Monthly Archive for December, 2006

i want to build a MythBox. Looking at the harware requirements/suggestions, it would cost under $500 (price is mainly the TV tuner card) to record one show and watch another… Why get TiVo (which is $200 plus the subscription) when you can build a MythBox ($100 – $500, depending on need, sales, equipment, etc) without any kind of subscription. This is the setup i’m looking at:
MicroATX motherboard and case (to keep space requirements to a minimum) with an Athlon64 processor (even though a P3/P4 will also work). 512Mb of RAM, 100Gb SATA hard drive (although IDE is acceptable), a 128Mb video card with TV-out. Sound and ethernet are on-board (and, since this box will be next to the router, no wireless is needed). A Wireless keyboard and mouse will be around for direct access. It will sport two WinTV PVR-150 tuner cards (with its own hardware decoder to move that processing off of the CPU) with a remote. MythTV also has a plugin that consists of serveral emulators (MAME for the arcarde games, NES and SNES) as well as a DVD ripper and RSS reader. The more i think about it, the more i think this box will not only be a MythBox, but also the publicly accessible web server (which is currently running on my own computer) and router/firewall for the rest of the home network (i.e. DHCP server).
For under $500, it will be a good deal (in the long run) because (1) no TiVo subscriptions, (2) reusable, (3) powerful enough to perform its job without bogging down (and the Athlon64 chipset has the PowerNow throttling ability), (4) expandable (having 1-3 extra PCI slots means having 1-3 more tuners…and that means recording up to 4 shows at once while still playing “live” TV….also having another SATA port means having room for another hard drive, as well as being able to upgrade the current 100Gb one), and (5) OpenSource, active development (more goodies in the future).