I have decided to build my own HTPC box running Mythtv on top of Linux. Most likely I will be either using the Mythbuntu distro or a custom install atop of Ubuntu or Debian.
To Give you an idea of what MythTV looks like here are a few screenshots:
My goal is to build a mythtv box for the least amount of money possible but still have the ability to do what I would like it. I’m looking for this to function as not only a DVR but also play videos as well as play music or stream online stations.
The following components are what I came up with:
Antec NSK2480 Black/Silver MicroATX Case 380W PSU - $99.99
GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - $79.99
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 NSTC/ATSC/QAM/FM PCI Tuner - $99.99
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.1GHz 65W Retail Processor - $61.99
Kingston 512MB DDR2 PC2 6400 Desktop Memory - $13.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s HD - $84.99
LITE-ON Black 16X SATA DVD-ROM Drive - $17.99
I’m still not set on the hard drive size or amount of ram as I might decide to go bigger. So far the total cost for the box would be $458.89. Also I wondering if there are any qam based capture cards out there that support hardware MPEG4 or even better yet H.264 encoding because its far more efficient then MPEG2 that the Hauppauge does. This would allow for more recordings on the same amount of disk space. If since I’d rather use one of the two over MPEG2 I would have to have the main cpu go back and transcode the videos to H.264. This as you can image requires quite a bit of processing power.
That brings me to my next thought. I have discovered that they make motherboards that are even smaller then my MicroATX solution I already came up with and posibly cheaper. They call these ITX or mini-ITX.
Personally I would rather go this route as there are some other benefits to it besides size. They also use extremely low amount of power(thus the term green pc) usually around 65W or less, and run cool requiring less fans and generating less heat.
Below is an example of an ITX mainboard and case:
These things are tiny(think mac mini size). However they have a few downsides. First I’m having a hard time find are board that has a decent on board sound with spdif + analog output, HDMI/DVI with decent gpu, and a gigabit nic. There the the issue of cpu power as most arent as powerful as larger systems most likely ruling out the possibility of transcoding video to H.264 let alone MPEG4. I’m also wondering if they might struggle with MPEG2 HD content? there isn’t a lot of info out there on these new systems yet and how well they perform as a HTPC/DVR.
At any rate I’m not in any hurry and plan to do more research on this project of mine.
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