Design changes soon to come for theanorak.org…but first, I’ve bitten the bullet and started buying parts for a Mythbox. I’ll probably use an older machine to start with, but the plan is to recycle my current desktop machine (Athlon XP1700) to give it a bit more power for transcoding and playback of non-MPEG2 content. With that in mind, I’ve ordered a couple of DVB-T cards (the Hauppage Nova-T’s which seem to be fairly well supported by Mythtv) and an AGP Geforce FX5200.
Why the 5200? Well, irritatingly the 9600XT which I have in my desktop machine doesn’t do motion compensation in hardware under linux, where the nvidia cards do. Plus, the 5200 doesn’t have a fan so it’s one less noisemaker next to the tv. I’ll need to figure out how to cut down on noise from the rest of the system – I’m thinking a Zalman heatsink to replace the northbridge fan, and probably a new case with 120mm fans…maybe even a 92mm fan converter on the processor HS.
More on this subject later…