Media PC
From GWiki
Contents |
Introduction
I've decided to cancel my Sky subscription, but I've also got used to having HD Sky Plus for the past couple of years. As well as the ability to record and watch stuff when it's quiet, there were a couple other things that I particularly liked about Sky:
1. The picture quality is noticably better when using the HDMI cable than with a SCART cable. 2. The ability to set a recording via the Internet.
I had a look to see which PVRs would let me do that without spending a fortune, and came up blank. Some came close - there's a nicely customisable Topfield and a Wharfdale with HDMI, which was pretty much impossible to get hold of at the time (last week, at the time of writing). I also priced up building a Media PC, and for £450 it was possible to put something together which looks nice under the TV, has a 500GB HD (larger than most early in 2008; but pretty small if you're reading this after about 2009) and runs MythTV on Linux. This is a much more powerful and versatile setup than buying an off the shelf PVR and a bit of fun, as well, so this is what I'm doing.
Hardware
I've gone for the following:
- MSI Media Live AM2 Barebone
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000
- 2GB RAM
- 500GB SATA Hard Drive
- Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T 500 Dual digital DVB-T PCI TV Tuner card
(Please report any links that no longer work).
All available from e-buyer. The MSI case includes a motherboard and slot DVD drive, which is why they're not on the list. The bits all arrived the day after they were ordered and I went to work putting them together. I'm not permanently attaching a mouse/keyboard as I expect that once everything's installed and set up, any further maintenance will be done remotely using ssh. Mostly.
The case is very well made and really does look the part. I'm not going to go into the full spec here, because it's available elsewhere on the web, but it has a wide selection of A/V outputs, including VGA, SCART and HDMI, USB front and back, Infrared remote control, memory card reader...
The case comes apart easily with the aid of a screwdriver and despite being compact, fitting the processor, fan (included with the case), memory, hard drive and TV card only took a few minutes. Unfortunately for me, that's where it started to go wrong because after powering it all up, the fans spun (extremely quietly. Probably quieter than my Sky HD box) and the DVD drive and hard disk both chuntered but nothing else happened, so at least some of it is going back to e-buyer.
After sending a request on the MSI support website, they suggested that I try different RAM modules. I had installed a pair of Kingston KVR800D2N5/1G modules (which are on the MSI website as being OK). Changing them to KVR667D2N5/512 (which were in another PC) made it boot.
MythTV
MythTV is a PVR project available as a package from the MythTV website, but a search for MythTV distribution on a search engine of your choice will also get you links to .iso images which will also install and configure Linux for you as well. Although I've used Linux quite a bit, I am going to use a distribution based on Ubuntu Linux and called Mythbuntu. There are a couple of others widely available based on Fedora and Knoppix, but I'm used to Ubuntu as I've been running it for a while now.
Here is a quick overview of just some of the features in version 0.20.2 (just grabbed from the website):
- Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV
- Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings
- Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
- Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
- Grabs program information using xmltv
- Basic video editing abilities. Optional transcoding to remove the commercials from the video file to save space
- Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card
- Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record
- Program Finder to quickly and easily find the shows you want to record
- A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely
- Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files
- An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
- An image viewer/slideshow
- A weather module
- A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
- A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes
- An RSS news feed reader module
- A fully themeable menu to tie it all together
Installing MythTV
Installation obviously requires a keyboard and (optional) mouse. I used an Advent wireless pair, with the USB dongle plugged into the back of the box. This will allow me to perform any local maintenance without needing to plug them in again.
I downloaded the Mythbuntu distribution, burned it to a DVD an popped it into the drive. Installation of the OS and MythTV software is pretty straightforward; insert the DVD, answer the usual questions and wait.
Once that was done, I found that the Hauppauge drivers were not included in the Linux kernel. This isn't difficult to sort out, and this page has some instructions on what to do.
Next, was the Futaba display on the front of the box. Again, getting this working isn't too much of a problem, and instructions can be found here.
That's about it, really. I now have a nice system working, which even allows remote setup and viewing of recorded programmes via the Internet. It does hang occasionally, but not often enough to be a major problem.
Hot, hot, hot
In use, the case gets very hot. Uncomfortably hot to touch. This is because the processor fan sucks cold air in from the top of the case, blows it over the processor and then distributes it around the inside. Some of the nicely heated air escapes through the ventilation holes in the sides, but most of it heats the case up. It's actually quite painful to touch. Fortunately, this is easily remidied by removing the processor fan/heatsink, popping the fan out and turning it over. The case now runs quite cool, as all the hot air is forced out of the top.
Games
