A Truly Silent Home Theater PC Built for Linux

slimrabbit writes "LinuxDevices is reporting on a truly silent home theater PC that comes with its own Fedora 5 based quick install Linux DVD capable of installing a fully-configured FC5 system with LIRC, KDETV, TV-Time and Kradio in about 15 minutes. The most notable features are its "church mouse quiet" 14dba power supply, TV-Out (SVideo and composite), component video, DVI and VGA out, and hardware MPEG support(XvMC). The company also supports and engages the Linux community through its sponsorship program. It is sponsoring knoppmyth and the Debian User Project and makes the mechanical drawings of its face plates available under the GPL."

Replacement for XBOX

[slidersv]

Finally I will be able to replace my XBOX, which is used solely for home theater purposes, with this HD-DVD capable system.
There is no HDMI, but component and DVI should suffice for most.

Three fans + HD + DVD won't be silent

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter seems to have confused quiet with "truly silent." In addition to the power supply's 14db fan, there are two more case fans. The CPU lacks a fan, relying on nearby vent holes on the top of the case for air intake - don't set anything on top! It also uses a hard drive, apparently not in an acoustic enclosure, and lacks any noticable means of acoustically muffling the DVD-ROM drive. And in general, fan quietness often comes at a cost of unsufficient cooling. If it's reliable, at $550 for the loaded system, I could still see it being kinda cool. But not silent, and maybe not even all that quiet when the DVD fires up.

Re:Replacement for XBOX

[SuperQ]

It's a 25 foot (7.62m) cable. You need decent shielding for the video signal over that long. Monster wants $170 for a 20 foot (6m) cable, that's way more stupid. :)

Re:Replacement for XBOX

[Millenniumman]

Why would you get a 25' converter cable? Just get an adapter (no cable), and get a long HDMI cable. It's going to be cheaper, and far more versatile.

Insane energy consumption

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason I am not engaging in any PC-based home theatre appliance is the 350-500 Watt power consumption.
I am always looking for energy saving, and I think it's insane to use that much power for playing/recording DVDs, music, compared to CD or DVD players/recorders, which consume much less energy.

Re:Good price tag too

[BLKMGK]

I looked at this system not too long ago after having seen some other Myth type article - think it was on Engadget, might have been Digg - cannot find it now. Anyway while digging I found more than one post or scrap of info on the Pundit box from folks complaining that they were having some issues configuring it for Linux. For those of us who aren't really adept at Linux this might be a bit of a bargain if it held a ready to go image of Myth and skipped those issues.

However reading the article it looks like it comes with drivers and NO Myth at all... Even the "fully" configured one from http://www.lixsystems.net/lix/index.htm [lixsystems.net] doesn't appear to come with Myth installed. They do make the software they've configured available so that's a start. A shame they couldn't have gone just a bit further and made it pretty much complete..