Our prospective MythTV box is more or less ready for the software. The shop that was investigating the source of my problem had called to say that they had got to the bottom of it, so off I went in our new car (which still has fewer than 100 km on the clock) to collect it.
It turns out that some kind of short-circuit was the issue. They took everything out, put it back in and then the system worked. I had pulled out virtually everything, but had left the motherboard in place. I can’t imagine what could have been causing a short-circuit, but I have to hand it to them: they found the problem and I didn’t. The bloke who had actually investigated the problem wasn’t present today, so I couldn’t ask whether he had managed to trace the exact location of the problem.
Anyway, I said I’d talk about the hardware a little bit once I’d got the system built, so here we go. Let’s start with a list of all the parts.
The outer case was one of the most expensive parts for this DIY PVR adventure; in fact, the most expensive component (with the hard drive a close second). It’s a black OrigenAE X11 box. It comes with a VFD on the front, with its own user guide. The VFD will be used to display time, channel and programme information. It also has an IR unit, so that the box can accept commands from a remote control. All of this is supposedly compatible with Linux. We’ll see. The box also features front-panel USB and audio inputs, which could prove handy later on.
The motherboard I chose is an Asus P5P800 SE, a Socket 775 board with on-board Gigabit LAN and sound. It can take 2 Serial ATA devices, plus the usual IDE ones. It appealed to me because it was quite cheap, had lots of PCI slots, no PCI-E slots (which I don’t need), plus AGP for the video card. I read that Linux doesn’t yet play well with some PCI-E video cards, so I decided to go with tried and trusted technology. This box doesn’t need cutting-edge hardware, anyway. This motherboard is also lacking Firewire support, which would have been nice, since the X11 case has a front-panel Firewire port.
For the CPU, I had originally chosen an Intel Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz unit. Unfortunately, this went out of stock at the on-line shop from which I was purchasing all of the parts, so I then chose the more expensive 2.8 Ghz model. Finally, I noticed that the 3 Ghz model was only €20 more and had an extra megabyte of Level 2 cache, so I changed the order again. This is the one I finally bought.
Because this system will live in the living-room, it needs to be as quiet as possible. For this reason, I purchased an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro heatsink/fan unit to replace the standard Intel one. The fan’s mounting system is particularly nice and should help to reduce a lot of the noise.
The power supply is a Tagan TG480-U15. There’s no point skimping on this part and it doesn’t use any more electricty if the parts it’s powering require less than its full capacity, so I went for a 480 watt unit. It’s a nice-looking unit, as PSUs go.
A gigabyte of Kingston RAM will provide volatile memory.
The hard drive had to be beefy, because this PVR will be seeing a lot of work. Speed was important, as was capacity. I opted for a 500 Gb Seagate Barracuda. It’s a 7200 RPM drive with an 8.2 ms seek time. I’m not sure how silently it will run, so we’ll have to see.
For playing DVDs and archiving to DVD, I chose a Plextor PX-755SA rewriter. It can handle DVD±RW, including the dual layer variants and is a SATA device, rather than IDE.
The video card is an ASUS N6800XT/TD, a 128 Mb 8x AGP card with an NVIDIA chipset.
The TV tuner card is a MythTV stalwart, the Hauppauge PVR-350, complete with IR unit and remote-control. I chose this, rather than the double tuner PVR-500, because UPC’s digital TV offering allows only one single tuner set-top box per household. True, I could connect a second tuner to the analogue cable TV, but I’m going to wait and see how this works out for now. Even if I did that, the PVR-500 has only a single signal input, which it then splits internally. That would make it impossible to connect plain old analogue cable and digital cable to a single card, anyway. I’ll need another DVR-350 if I want to take that route.
Naturally, this box needs to be networked in order to pick up its programme guide, amongst other things. After careful consideration, I finally picked the Netgear WG311, primarily because it works with the MadWifi driver, with which I have had good results.
Last but not least, the MythTV box will need to be able to change channels on the digital TV set-top box when it needs to record a programme starting on another channel. Many set-top boxes have an old-fashioned RS232 interface for this, but UPC’s Thomson-made box of tricks doesn’t. What to do? After some scouting around, my best bet seemed to be Mike over at irblaster.info. He makes IR transmitters that yoiu can connect at one end to the serial port of your PC, whilst at the other of the cable is an IR emitter. Basically, you drape the cable from behind over the front of the set-top box and then send IR signals down it. Essentially, you’re glueing a remote-control to the receiving eye of the set-top box. It’s a dirty hack and will be the least elegant part of the whole set-up, but at least it will work. This is the only piece of hardware purchased from outside The Netherlands. I paid by Paypal and the device arrived within just a few days: very prompt service, indeed.
I must confess that picking out the hardware wasn’t much fun. A lot of research was required to avoid buying parts that would not (properly) function under Linux, would not work with each other, would not generate an excessive amount of noise, etc. Then there was the physical hassle of building the system, followed by the grief and delay when the whole combo refused to play ball. I’m just not a hardware guy at the end of the day. Give me a box with working hardware, but no operating system, and let me work my software magic on it.
Anyway, we’re more or less at that stage now. I say more or less, because I had to send the broken TV tuner card back to be exchanged. I don’t yet have the replacement and it’s a pretty essential part, so I’m stuck for a few more days.
Furthermore, Fedora Core 5 will be released on 15th March and it would be nice if that could go straight onto the system without needing to upgrade from FC4 or FC5 test3. What’s a few more days? That’ll give me time to replace the TV card, anyway.
