The Mini-ITX Linux PVR Project 223
An anonymous reader writes "Home theater PCs have taken many shapes and forms, perhaps none more interesting than this Mini-ITX PVR. In part three of its Mini-ITX project, XYZ Computing has turned its Mini-ITX box into a Linux PVR, using Ubuntu and MythTV. This is a lot of computer in a very small package and designing it, putting it together, and then getting it to work was an interesting process. The article is a great guide for people who are interested in their own Mini-ITX Linux PVR, but also goes over the problems and pitfalls of a build like this."
Re:One line summary (Score:1, Informative)
Bootable Knoppix live CD with most of the goodies pre-installed and auto-configured.
One word reply to you ;-) (Score:5, Informative)
Knopmyth [mysettopbox.tv]
Site is dying. First page: and my thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
Wednesday, 22 March 2006
Page 1 of 7
By: Sal Cangeloso
For the past few months I have been spending a lot of time using my Mini-ITX computer. This was originally a project system which I put together so that I would have something small and silent for my living room, on which I could do a few very basic tasks, like check my email and get on the internet. The first part of the project featured a system which booted Puppy Linux off of a flash USB drive, a solution which was simple and quiet, but not very powerful. In the second part of the project the system was given a new case, improved cooling, and it booted off of a LiveCD and could save to a CF card. As I used the system more I decided the best course of action would be to make a few more changes and increase the system's functionality, despite the impact that this could have on its silent operation.
This time I had some big plans in store for the Mini-ITX box. The plans were, roughly, to install a hard drive, move to a more powerful Linux distribution, and add PVR capabilites to the system. Because the computer was already situated in my living room, making it into a personal video recorder was an obvious choice, though doing this on a Mini-ITX Linux system would surely take a bit of finesse. "
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I wish that they said what "ITX" means.
PVR is Personal Video Recorder which describes a digital device like a TIVO or MythTV software for a computer system with TV input.
I've used an All In Wonder 8500DV to record TV onto my computer, but my biggest roadblock has been poor ATI drivers for Windows that disabled Hibernation, crashes XP, and fails to work well in Linux even as a video card never mind as a TV system.
Cables, cables, cables (Score:2, Informative)
P.S. VDR is a much better solution than Myth in countries with DVB-S and DVB-T.
pre-emptive coracl cache (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How loud is the dvd drive? (Score:3, Informative)
1. Archive all DVD's on hard drives in another room. (That's what I do, not just to avoid the noise... Having my media library archived like this is pretty sweet in general.) On OS X, Mac the Ripper is probably the best tool. (Make sure to get a hold of the version 3 beta to get around newer DVD copy protection schemes.)
2. Plug a big external DVD drive, like the one from LaCie into the firewire port. Yeah, it's an extra box, but the mini + the DVD case still add up to less space than a typical component system DVD player.
PVR-350 - Bad Choice for this application (Score:5, Informative)
The major difference between the PVR-350 and the PVR-250/150 is that the 350 has video output (MPEG2 decompression). Seeing as the board he selected has video out built in (and a processor that is plenty-capable enough), the PVR-350 was an unnecessary added expense. Also, the PVR-350 is slow at outputting X-menus, cannot do OpenGL or any acceleration except for MPEG2, DVD decoding is slow, games won't work, etc. Basically, the PVR-350 is useful ONLY for MPEG2 TV output.
ALSO - the current stable version of MythTV (0.19) has a bug where fast forwarding and rewinding greater than 3X don't work properly. There is no timeframe for fixing the bug, as not all that many people are using the 350.
A better choice would have been to get a PVR-500 to get dual-tuners, or at least a MCE version of the 150 (take up less space in the teeny case) and use the onboard SVideo out (or VGA out converted).
For the windows farts like me (Score:5, Informative)
So what i did in the meanwhile is installing my hauppauge 350 on my own PC, a winxp box, with GB_PVR) http://www.gbpvr.com/ [gbpvr.com]. Its free, its windows-based (.net) and it works great. As far as i understand from it, its the closest thing to mythTv on the win platform.
in fact, it work so nicely that i dont even feel the rush of building my ubuntu pvr.
MiniITX is not worth it (Score:3, Informative)
As it is already mentioned in the article, you pay a decent premium for the small size. But that's not the main issue. The biggest problem is cooling. Sure the EPIA processors are quite tolerant, but for a media center silence is the main issue. The cooling fan, 40x40mm is non-standard as is the whole cooling unit. So you can't buy one of the many excellent standard silent coolers.
He replaced it with a custom 40mm fan, but I personally highly doubt that it is really silent with 3000rpm. Plus one has also to consider the airflow compared to the original fan. When I built my system, I was unable to find a similar fan with the same airflow, even considering Papst and Verax.
Another thing is, that the 1GHz CPU is really slow. I ran into problem when playing DivX or XVid movies. Then under Linux (at least at the time I was building the system, dunno where they are at this point) there were no drivers for the Hardware-MPEG2 accelerator, so DVD playbay wasn't possible.
My conculsion is: If you go for MicroATX instead, you'll have just a slightly bigger case, however Standard components. There are zillion of cheap, reliable and silent CPU coolers, Power Supplies etc. Plus any decent CPU, even a Pentium III 1 GHz is faster than this VIA processor.
Why not using epiOS? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Conten
Check out epiOS (Score:2, Informative)
Some impressions:
http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Conten
The epiOS support forums:
http://www.epios.net/ [epios.net]
A lot of users already combined it with MythTV.
Mini-ITX? Not for the backend, IMHO (Score:5, Informative)
One of the big advantages of Myth is its support for transcoding the recordings after they're done, removing commercials automatically, and archiving them to, say, DivX or XviD format. You're not going to be doing that with a 1 GHZ processor on a Mini ITX board.
Much better to get a real box for the backend, which does the recording, and network it to the Mini ITX box to use as the frontend, which runs the user interface.
Personally, I got sick of seeing my 2.8 GHZ P4 Hyperthreaded Sony desktop being used as the family web browser/email machine (such a waste!) so I replaced it with a nice little 2.4 GHZ Compaq EVO from Ebay and am building Myth 0.19 on Ubuntu on the Sony. It's big, it has space for two hard drives, it has a DVD burner and a CDROM drive built in, and it's SILENT, even when running 3+ hour video reencoding jobs at 100% CPU. Got a 300 GB Samsung drive for it, with room for another before I need to go external.
Today my PVR-350 comes, so that'll get me really going on the build. I'll try and use its video output, but I'm starting to see a lot of limitations with that, as the author mentions. I may get a cheap NVidea card with TV out instead. But the PVR-350's are the same price, if not cheaper, as the 250's right now, so why not get one?
Next thing to check out is getting a cable box with Firewire output from Comcast to record some HDTV on, even though I only have a standard TV. Supposedly they're required by the FCC to give me a box with Firewire that outputs at least all "must carry" (read: local broadcast) stations unencrypted, we'll see.
I currently have a Panasonic Showstopper (also known as a ReplayTV first generation) which has worked well for going on five years, but the Myth user interface simply blows it out of the water - killer searching and recording options, a remote REAL-TIME web interface (Replay has one, but the box only dials up once a night - wanna record something now when you're at work, you're out of luck). Plus weather, RSS, and a general video storage area that will also mean I can move my XBox running XBox Media Center to another room.
Once this is all happy, I may look into getting some Mini-ITX boxes with monitors for the kids' rooms and load Ubuntu on them - voila, web surfing and email that I can control and monitor, and Myth frontend machines for them to watch shows on, which I can also monitor.
Geek family nirvana!
IR Blaster complex? Bah! (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, just get this: http://www.mytvstore.com/product_id_004.html [mytvstore.com]. The MyBlaster/Serial eliminates needing LIRC for the IR Blaster (which the article's author could then leave for just his PVR-350's remote, as I have). Use the excellent Perl script that is found here: http://www.mytvstore.com/mythtv_linux.html [mytvstore.com], set the device smack in front of your cable/sat boxes IR reciever (I find a small patch of double sided tape lasts for over a year, at least
And did I say that this requires *no* LIRC fiddling? OK, just making sure.
Re:Alternative (mod down the FUD) (Score:2, Informative)
http://hometheater.consumerelectronicsnet.com/art
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/ [intel.com]
mmm.... FUD.
Re:One word reply to you ;-) (Score:3, Informative)
" What is KnoppMyth?
* Short Answer: KnoppMyth is Knoppix optimized for MythTV.
* Long Answer: Our vision is a distribution that makes it trivial to setup a set-top box.
We've included everything that believe is needing to reach this goal.
And, in fact, the developers use this distribution on their own PVR's.
What is Knoppix?
* See http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html [knopper.net]
What is MythTV?
* See http://mythtv.org/ [mythtv.org]
Cool! So does this run completely from the CD?
* No. You can use the CD as a frontend, but KnoppMyth must be installed to the hard drive.
Will it ever run completely from the CD?
* Maybe. "
So you can't test it unless you install it.
I believe the OP was asking about a live cd that had a hard drive install as an option.
Only in the US (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I may be mistaken... (Score:3, Informative)
Most people want a pretty box, and many of the mini ITX cases meet that description. I think the mATX is quite small enough, but standard ATX just looks bulky. The last one I built used a Silverstone LC11M and I would say that's borderline too big.
500MHz - 1GHz is arguably a little slow, especially for the OSD. If you're recording a lot of TV, you might not be able to transcode overnight with that CPU either. I tend to use a 754-based sempron which is overkill but offers nice power features.
For the video card, it is quite handy if the card does xvmc - especially if you're still planning on going with a 1GHz CPU. It is essential that it does xv. This restricts it to a midrange geforce 4 or better. I really need to get around to checking if the 6150 does xvmc...
IR varies a whole heap in price depending on how pretty it is - a budget setup costs as little as $20 (you can even spend about $20 extra on your PVR150 to get the non OEM version with IR). Often the prettier cases, such as the aforementioned LC11M, have built in IR too. The Microsoft remote is $100 for a three pack from memory. Another alternative is the ATI which uses radio instead of IR. If you're feeling rich, then something like the logitech harmony will set you back $250.