right on bro!

In a fit of sheer boredom, I decided I’m going to resurrect the PC-based PVR. Except I’m gonna do it a little different this time - I’m going to set up a MythTV box and run Linux.

Goals for the Courtleigh Super Cool Home Theater PC:

• It has to be super quiet, as it’ll be in my bedroom running 24/7.
• It has to be cheap (no dual-core Athlons).
• It has to be small enough to fit in my TV rack. (Oddly enough, this rules out most of the HTPC cases out there - they’re well over 6″ tall. It also means I have to go micro ATX instead of recycling my old motherboard, which makes this project not cheap anymore, but, well, it’ll be cool if this actually works.)
• Recording analog television from my cable box.
• Automatic transcoding of all recorded shows to an iPod-compatible format. Also, set up an RSS feed of these transcoded shows and have them automatically sent to my iPod.)
• Eventually, I’d like to get a 2nd tuner and record over-the-air HD shows.
• DVD ripping/movie storage.
• Internal Web server so anybody in the house can stream video to their PC.
• I want to see what Linux is all about. (Also, I’m too cheap to buy another Windows license.)
• Private development Web server.

So, I just ordered a bunch of parts, which should be here in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m gonna start downloading the Fedora Core 4 ISOs, which is what my co-worker recommended. (If any of you other Linux guys recommend a different distro, please drop me a line.) Judging by their size, it’s gonna take a couple of weeks to download them anyway.

The reaction I got from a couple of people at work was, “Yeah, good luck. It’s gonnna be tough to get everything to work properly. But let me know if you get it working so I can build one.” Well, we’ll see.