DVR (1 of 3): Hardware

This summer I took it on myself to set up an alternative to the standard tube-based television setup that included a DVD player, cable box, VCR and receiver. Not owning anything other than a receiver, I did not want to invest money in such bulky and uncustomizable hardware. I also wanted to be able to watch DVDs at DVD resolution (720x480 vs. 640x480) and I wanted better color reproduction than most TVs had to offer. I ended up building a custom computer-based setup using the open source software package MythTV, and I have been loving it ever since.

This is going to be pretty in depth, so I have chosen to break it into three parts. This communiqué will cover the hardware, and subsequent entries will cover the operating system and software.

In the spirit of open source software, I took advantage of as much work by others as possible. Even so, I spent free time for about two months getting my system set up perfectly. (Most people would not need nearly as much time since I spent about a month and a half of that trying to recover data from a hard drive that crashed and lost its filesystem.) The sections above will explain some of the rationale I used when choosing specifics such as the hardware, the operating system and, of course, MythTV.

Below are some links to sites that were especially useful while setting up my system. Google can be a great friend if you know exactly what you are looking for, but I found that I was able to solve 98% of my issues by using the following sites below.

• MythTV Site - The documentation section of the MythTV site is the first place to look
• Jarod Wilson's MythTV on Fedora Guide - This guide has step-by-step instructions that will save many hours of time. While it doesn't cover every hardware setup, it gives probably the most complete and varied guide on the internet for MythTV.
• MythTV Users Mailing List Archive - I didn't discover how useful this was until I was two-thirds of the way done with my system. People constantly are helping each other troubleshoot issues.
• MythTV Development Mailing List Archive - This also I did not discover until late in the game, but helped me debug a few issues with my system.

Hardware

Deciding on what hardware to use was probably the most enjoyable part (aside from finishing the project). Below is a brief overview of what I used for part, along with some rationale.

Screen

I wanted the ability to upgrade my system to HDTV in the future (more about this in the tuner card section), but also to be able to watch DVDs at their native resolution. I also did not have a ton of money to spend, so I choose to go with the Dell 2001FP. This 20" LCD has a native resolution of 1600x1200 (high enough for everything but 1080i), and sports good color reproduction. Dell seems to have coupons for these on a regular basis, and I got mine for about $450.

Case

One of the two most visible parts of the system (the other is the screen), I decided to go with a slick-looking case that would fit in with my existing Onkyo receiver (a nice stereo receiver). The other concern I had with a case is that I wanted to set up a large RAID 5 disk array, so I needed a large number of drive bays. The result of quite a bit of searching was the Silverstone SST-LC01. This all-aluminum (helps with heat dissipation from seven hard drives) case looks nice in my entertainment center, but also has four internal 3.5" drive bays, two external 3.5" drive bays (that I used for hard drives), and two 5.25" external drive bays. A little on the pricey side ($160), this case has worked out perfectly for me.

Power Supply

All of the PCs in my house (my wife and I each have one) are quite. Both run at a whisper, and we like it that way. That combined with the fact that we didn't want to have to turn the volume of our TV up to mask computer noise made volume a big factor in choosing a power supply. I also wanted to get an efficient power supply so that we don't waste extra electricity, and to help keep our electricity bill down. I spent quite a bit of time researching power supplies, and through Silent PC Review, I found the Seasonic S12-380. This power supply provides a maximum of 380 watts of power (more that enough for almost any home PC), and boasts up to 80% efficiency. This cost me about $80.

Motherboard

The decision to pick the motherboard I chose was driven by the fact that NVidia-based motherboards seemed to have less issues with the Linux IVTV driver (require for the tuner card I chose). I also needed a motherboard that supported socket 462 chips (for an AMD Athlon XP), and most importantly it needed to be able to fit the CPU cooler I chose. I found the DFI NFII U400S-AL after spending time looking at product photos, trying to determine if my large CPU Cooler would fit. I spent about $60 on it.

CPU

Every computer I have built in the past three or so years has been using an AMD CPU. In general I like them because they run cooler than Inter P4s (this being easier to cool), and because they are cheaper. I ended up getting the Athlon XP 2800+ since it is one of the fastest chips in its series, and only cost $95.

CPU Cooler

Another decision driven by Silent PC Review, this time from their Recommended Heat Sinks Section, the Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu was just what I needed. This thing is quiet, but also has a control knob (that I mounted on the back of my case) that lets to change the speed of the fan. This is helpful when I boot my media PC into Windows XP to play some games.

Graphics Card

Nvidia has much better linux support than ATI does, so it was a no-brainer to choose the Nvidia card. I ended up getting a Rosewill Geforce FX5200 with heatsink only (no fan to create noise). This allows me to run the Dell 2001FP via DVI connection, and provides enough juice to do some gaming in Windows.

Tuner Card

I wanted the ability to be able to record one show, while watching another, or in the future to be able to watch one show on the master system and one on a frontend-only system (more about this later). Hauppauge makes quite a number of tuner cards, and their PVR-500MCE was the best fit for me. I was hoping to get a HDTV card, however there are no HDTV tuner cards that exist and that will take a CableCard. Thus I would have to have at least one set top box to decode the encrypted HDTV signal. This kind of defeats the purpose of the one-box approach. The PVR-500MCE cost me $140.

Sound Card

I ended up just using the sound card build into my motherboard. I could probably get a little better sound from a SoundBlaster card, but I have not noticed any noise or problems from the onboard sound, so I will stick with it for now.

Network Card

I ended up getting a Gigabit switch for our network this summer, so I grabbed a generic Gigabit card by Zylex. Performance is pretty good even without jumbo frames. Between the media PC and my computer I have clocked up to 26 megabytes per second.

Raid Card

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to put a large RAID 5 disk array into this media PC from the start. In fact, I have had two 250GB PATA hard drives for almost two years now, and I purchased a raid card from eBay last winter. I didn't want to replace all of my PATA drives with SATA, so I had to find a raid card that supported PATA. Most of the cards that were true hardware raid rather than software raid cost over $300. I found the LSI Logic Megaraid i4 (which in the past month has been discontinued) on eBay for $180. While it only has two channels, it supports up to two drives per channel, allowing you to connect up to eight drives. The performance with the card has been pretty good, however driver support has been replaced in recent Linux kernels with an updated drive for other Megaraid products. This updated driver does not work with the i4, so some specific commands have to be issued when installing Linux to get the right driver.

Hard Drives

Currently the media PC is running five 250GB hard drives (from various manufacturers), and two 180GB hard drives. The five 250GB drives are set up in a RAID 5 array, producing a drive with 1TB of capacity. The two 180GB drives are set up in RAID 1, yielding 180 GB of storage space. Linux and Windows XP are installed on the RAID 1 array, with 110GB of space left over for storage.

DVD Drive

I just purchased the cheapest plain black DVD drive from NewEgg. It is a LiteOn 16P9S which only cost $20, and has worked great.

Remote Control

I already had an ATI Remote Wonder that came with an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder that I purchased a few years ago. There seems to be fairly good support for this in Linux with LIRC and the ati_usb kernel module.

Keyboard & Mouse

I am a huge fan of Microsoft's keyboard and mice, so I got the inexpensive Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 for $45.

I would highly recommend any of these hardware parts for a MythTV box (with the possible exception of the raid card since that is discontinued). Be sure to check back tomorrow for the next segment, DVR (2 of 3): Operating System, and on Wednesday for DVR (3 of 3): Software.