TechTalk

What is a Home theatre PC? Ill let the Wikipedia explain:

A home theatre PC (HTPC) or media PC is a convergence device that combines the functions of a personal computer and a digital video recorder. It is connected to a television or a television-sized computer display and is often used as a digital photo, music, video player, TV receiver and digital video recorder.

This is my latest project, I am busy building my very own HTPC/PVR.

Software
I will be using a Linux distro and MyhtTv as the main software components. MythTv is, acording to the wikipedia:

MythTV is a Unix [1] application which turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming[2] digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theatre Personal Computer. MythTV is free software licensed under the GPL. It can be considered as a free and open source alternative to Tivo or Windows Media Centre.

Hardware
I have adopted a strong sense of re-use, lately my home is full of old PC’s and parts, so my idea with this build is to re-use as much of the components as I can. To build a HTPC you basically need a motherboard, cpu, RAM, graphics card or an on-board GPU, sound card or on-board sound, some TV Tuner or input source and Hard disk drive(s).

For my build I have a couple of options, I have discovered two working systems;

• AMD 1.6 ghz athlon XP, with 784MB RAM and an nforce 2 mcp chipset with on board geforce 4? (i think) GPU, 5.1 sound and lan
• AMD sempron 1.6ghz with 512mb ram geforce 6 series GPU, 5.1 sound and lan

I have since bought my self a Hauppage win-PVR 150 with MCE remote which as far as I can tell, is one of the best TV-Tuners to use in myth and Linux. It supports hardware Mpeg2 encoding so it takes strain of the cpu, and so frees up system resources.

Now the only problem I have with both of the systems is that, because they have integrated graphics, they don’t have TV/Video Out. I would like to view the content on my TV at some stage.

When HD comes, I would also need to upgrade the system, to support HD this can be done by buying a new graphics card, the problem is that AGP cards are very scarce at the moment the only option is the ATI 3850 HD, which would support HD as well.

But for now SD content is fine, so I discovered an old, Geforce 2 MX400 tv card with video out, it would work perfectly. (well so i hope :P)

Tonight I will be assembling the hardware and installing Ubuntu or MythBunutu, which is Ubuntu with MythTV included, I have heard that it is better to compile everything form source, will see how it works.

Will be posting pics and updates soon.

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