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#303381 - 24/10/2007 13:36 MediaPC
furtive old hand Registered: 14/08/2001 Posts: 886 Loc: London, UK	I've bought myself a MediaPC to go with my lovely new Samsung LCD telly. The spec is: Silverstone ML02/MXR Slimline Case with external PSU aBit ANM2HD(HDMI Motherboard 4800 Dual core CPU Low profile cooler 2GB RAM 500GB HDD Slot loading DVDRW Accuratus Toughball keyboard/trackball Vista Home premium 32bit BlackGold Single hybrid tuner Pair of homeplugs Still getting it setup and working properly, but it's fantastic. Anyone else doing anything similar? _________________________ Mk2a RioCar 120Gb - now sold to the owner of my old car Rio Karma - now on ebay...
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#303382 - 24/10/2007 15:10 Re: MediaPC [Re: furtive]
mlord carpal tunnel Registered: 29/08/2000 Posts: 14493 Loc: Canada	Quote: Anyone else doing anything similar? Do you mean, like, my 4-tuner Myth box from last year?
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#303383 - 24/10/2007 17:40 Re: MediaPC [Re: furtive]
LittleBlueThing addict Registered: 11/01/2002 Posts: 612 Loc: Reading, UK	Quote: I've bought myself a MediaPC to go with my lovely new Samsung LCD telly. The spec is: Anyone else doing anything similar? Another Myth user here Main TV room: 2.8m electric projector screen with a SANYO-Z5 (no traditional TV downstairs) (the screen was about £80+p+p brand new off eBay.de BTW <grin>) SPDIF to a Yamaha surround processor with a hifi frontend (Cyrus2, B+W, etc) Rel Stratus II subwoofer Oh - the PC is an AMD2000-ish with 1Gb memory and an old (quiet) Nvidia card. No hard disk - boots from the net. cheap and nasty DVD drive that works fine! LIRC (Linux InfraRed C???) Bedroom: 40" rear projector (now 7yrs old!) Antec Fusion case containing a motherboard with onboard lan/s-video/sound (also a diskless machine but it has a CPU+some RAM) Acoustic Energy Aego2 (fantastic) Also doubles as an alarm clock in the morning Also IR controlled Study: 1.2Tb RAID6 + lots of system space dual tuner (DVB-satellite + Sky via s-video hw mpeg2 encoder) 1Gb Ram The machine is one of the absolute bottom end Dell servers - they did them for £99 a couple of years back... SC420 IIRC This machine controls the Sky box using an IR transmitter (homebrew lirc) The master machine wakes up when a recording is due and when a remote frontend is powered on - all the machines do WakeOnLAN so they can be automated. Currently this machine has about 700 TV programs available. We've not watched live TV (or any adverts) in nearly 3 years now I also have a 24x7 server that does dns, dhcp, etherboot, email, music+data storage etc. That' s another £99 Dell and it is the network boot master... _________________________ LittleBlueThing Running twin 30's
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#303384 - 24/10/2007 17:44 Re: MediaPC [Re: furtive]
Waterman981 old hand Registered: 14/02/2002 Posts: 804 Loc: Salt Lake City, UT	Quote: Anyone else doing anything similar? I've got the most convoluted setup right now, but it works for me. Series 1 TiVo in the bedroom - I extract video off this and convert it to Xvids which I put on my file server. Windows File Server - Sits in the closet and just hosts file shares for Video, Pictures, & Music. No media center specific software. MythDora based PC - I used this just to record my OTA HD programming, but due to developments yesterday I may actually retire this. TiVo HD - As of yesterday supports Multi-Room viewing and Tivo To Go. I did an extract, cut the commercials with VideoReDo, and now just want to compare it to what I took off the Myth box. Should be exactly the same though. Media Portal based HTPC - This is the PC that actually sits with the rest of my HT gear. Currently on a 2.0 GHz P4 Dell, but will be buying a new Core 2 Duo Mobo, chip, and HTPC case for it this next week. Right now it plays back all my SD content great, but just doesn't quite cut it for HD. Just has a single 20GB hard drive as all the media comes over the network. All of this goes to my lovely new Samsung DLP telly. _________________________ -Michael #040103696 on a shelf Mk2a - 90 GB - Red - Illuminated buttons
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#303385 - 27/10/2007 22:19 Re: MediaPC [Re: mlord]
mlord carpal tunnel Registered: 29/08/2000 Posts: 14493 Loc: Canada	Quote: Quote: Anyone else doing anything similar? Do you mean, like, my 4-tuner Myth box from last year? Here's the MythTV setup we have here. That's an Antec Fusion case on the top right of the (custom built) cabinet. It's got a Foxconn mATX motherboard inside, with a Core2Duo @ 1.86Ghz with 2GB of PC6400 SDRAM. Theres an NVidia 6300 PCIe video card, purely for the DVI-D output, an LG SATA DVD+-RW/dl optical drive, and a pair of 340GB SATA drives in RAID0 for storage. Two Hauppauge PVR-250 NTSC tuners reside inside the Antec case, and the external HDHomeRun dual-ATSC tuner is hiding to the left of the empeg. There's a Logitech Z-5500 5.1 surround speaker system attached via the optical input. The speaker system control unit is on the shelf below the Antec case, next to the case full of ripped DVDs. An old and lonely VCR sits unplugged/unused below that. On the left side, is the docked empeg w/tuner module, sitting on top of our $25 progressive DVD player (also unplugged/unused). The Logitech subwoofer is underneath that. Lots of mass in the cabinet, so the sub doesn't vibrate it (much), and the Viewsonic 37" LCD on top gives a great view of Hockey Night in Canada (broadcast OTA in 1920x1024i HD). Multiple OTA antennas are on a tower above the house, with coaxial leads terminating in a mess of RF plumbing hidden inside the cabinet above the empeg. There's also an APC SMART-UPS 650 behind the DVD storage to keep things reliable. A small 5-port ethernet hub connects everything to a single drop from the main home network. Everything other than the Antec case is wired to a +5V driven power relay switch, so it all powers off (for real!) when the system is "off". The real-time clock alarm feature is used to automatically wake up the system for scheduled recordings as needed. Cheers Attachments 305045-myth1.jpg (74 downloads) Edited by mlord (27/10/2007 22:43)
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#303386 - 27/10/2007 22:50 Re: MediaPC [Re: mlord]
mlord carpal tunnel Registered: 29/08/2000 Posts: 14493 Loc: Canada	The Antec case has a big knob (rotary encoder), and a VFD. Both are USB connected, so I wrote a little standalone utility to query MySQL and Myth for the recording status and it displays that as scrolling text on the top line of the VFD. The bottom line shows time, date, and CPU temperature. The large knob is used to pause / manually scroll the display (no other good use for it). Infrared remote control of the entire setup is provided by the Hauppauge and Logitech remote controls that were included with the hardware. There's also a wireless keyboard & mouse combo stored to the left of the cabinet. Attachments 305047-vfd.jpg (77 downloads) Edited by mlord (27/10/2007 22:53)
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