OneAndOneIs2

Since Lou has got the TV card working and we can now use the MythTV box for its intended purpose, a few notes for posterity:

• Motherboard: PC Chips M848A
  No specific rationale for this one: We wanted a not-too-pricey MoBo with a decent number of PCI slots, an AGP slot, and a non-VIA chipset (VIA has issues with Myth apparently) and this was one that fit the bill.
• CPU: Athlon Sempron 2400
  Intel's all well and good, but I prefer AMD. Because digital TV is transmitted compressed and computer-readable, you don't need much power for it, so there was no point in going for some 64-bit supercomputer chip. It should be plenty enough should we need/want to record analogue, it's overkill for day to day use, and it was relatively cheap.
• Speeze EEA67B4 VultureSpin AMD CPU Cooler
  Specifically marketed as a quiet runner capable of anything up to an XP3200, this almost-silently keeps our Sempron well within tolerances. The last thing you want in a media PC is a noisy fan.
• RAM: Crucial 512MB
  Again more than we really need, but it wasn't worth buying less. I always buy Crucial RAM, they have very high standards.
• Case: Antec Black Overture II Quiet Media case
  This is a BIG case, but with advantages: All the heat-producing components are spread out well. The top is vented, so the CPU in particular can exhaust heat directly out of the case. The size of the case means large fans can be fitted, which also serves to keep the noise down. All of which combines to give a PC that keeps very cool with almost no noise. I'm a big fan of Antec cases: They're so easy to install drives in, and generally well-designed. And with good PSUs.
• Hard drive: Seagate 160GB
  You need a fair amount of space to record movies on, and Seagate make good hard drives.
• DVD-RW: LG GSA-4167BAL
  I confess, this was basically the first highly-rated DVD writer I came across when ordering. No other criteria involved.
• TV card: Hauppauge WINTV-HVR 1100
  Hauppauge, although they don't officially (as I understand it) supply drivers to Linux, are nevertheless well-supported by it; and the drivers for this card in particular were supplied to the kernel by a Hauppauge employee. That's a pretty Linux-friendly hardware supplier in my book. We wanted a card that would do digital (for the extra channels & ease of recording), but digital signal strength isn't up to much in Horsham, so this card being able to do analogue as well made it a safe bet. It also comes with a remote-control and IR sensor.
• Graphics card: My old NVIDIA MX440
  We had no need whatsoever for a powerful graphics card, just something that would do TV out (and even that is no longer needed courtesy of the new TV). We did need to install the NVIDIA driver, tho, in order to get the oddball TV resolution (1360x768) supported by Xorg.

That's the hardware. The OS: Ubuntu 6.10. Ubuntu is about the best compromise going for getting Linux onto a PC quickly & easily, and without getting two tons of superfluous software that you're never going to use on a media PC.

On top of Ubuntu, we have MythTV 0.20, with most of the plugins installed as well. We also used EasyUbuntu to install all the codecs and so forth with minimal fuss. The root partition is ext3, the media-storage partition is XFS.

Lou got the TV card set up mostly by following the excellent guide here and throwing in a few other Google searches and quite a bit of patience. I helped out with the odd bit of Linux knowledge when everything else failed (Like the irritating way ALSA thinks the TV card has a second sound card on it.)

So, with everything installed & working, what do we now have?

Well, we have a big black box plugged into our TV. We can watch digital TV with it, and we can pause & rewind it while we watch. We can record it to the hard drive (Haven't measured CPU or disk space usage yet). We can set it to record either directly at the PC, or via a Web interface.

We can watch DVDs with it. Copy-protection makes no difference. Region makes no difference. Put in a DVD and it will play. What's more, we can skip straight to the menu screen: No longer do we start every CSI-watching marathon being told that "Downloading is stealing"; no longer do our Disney movies bombard us with ads for their other films. We skip the whole lot: WE choose which parts of the DVD to watch, not Hollywood. The whole thing was worth it just for the DVDs, IMHO.

We can get the news off it: There's an RSS feed aggreggator that will show us everything from Slashdot to BBC News. There's also a plugin to weather.com which gives us all the local weather data, including funky satellite pictures and a 3-day forecast.

We can play music: MP3s, Oggs, Wavs, CDs, just about everything. With funky visualizations as well.

We can use any remote control with it: Whereas many people buy a "Universal remote" which they program to replace their multitude of remotes, a MythTV box can be programmed to understand any RC, so we can use our TV remote or the Hauppauge remote, entirely at our own discretion. (If we were feeling particularly geeky, we could use our Palm PDAs, since they have IR ports ;o)

We can play games, but we haven't installed any yet. I believe it'll run MAME ROMs and I have over a thousand of those, so we can easily remedy that ;o) Pong on Widescreen, that'll be just bizzare. . .

We can browse the web with it too, but it's not really worth it. And there's apparently Internet-phone functionality there as well, not tried it yet.

A pretty impressive list, huh? :o) Not bad for what's basically a fairly cheap PC with some free software installed, is it?

Just one other thing: It can play just about any movie format you can name as well. So I downloaded Elephants Dream, the movie made entirely with open-source tools (Blender) and released under a CC license. Because it can be had in High-Def format (1920x1080), it's really good for showing off/testing just how good a picture your TV can give (DVDs aren't good for testing this, they only store movies at 720x576) I gave ED a play when we finally got X11 working at full-size (1360x768), and it looked lovely.

The plotline still beats the Hell out of me. But it looks great!