• Case: Antec NSK2480, 380W PS
• Motherboard: ASUS M2NPV-VM AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 MicroATX
• Wireless Card: SMC SMCWPCIT-G PCI V2.2 (5V/3.3V) Wireless Adapter – Retail
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620A 400GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive – OEM
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 LE-1620 2.4GHz Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor Model
• Capture Card: Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• DVD: ASUS 18X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black PATA Model DRW-1814BL
• Memory: Crucial 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667

Synopsis

This hardware works excellently right out of the box with Knoppmyth – part of the reason is that I did my homework beforehand. Everything was purchased at NewEgg and arrived promptly and worked perfectly. I found this mix of hardware to be an excellent place to start if you’re looking to build a MythTV PVR. Total cost was a hair under $600, with shipping.

To go through each piece:

The Case – Antec NSK2480

It’s bigger than I thought – about the size of a component stereo tuner. NewEgg has the size wrong.

It’s quality stuff. Good fit and finish, easy to work with, quality fans and a quiet power supply.

The Motherboard – ASUS M2NPV-VM

More features than you can shake a stick at, including:

• Built-in nVidia graphics,
• Many video-out options,
• Paravirtualization support,
• Onboard LAN,
• SATA RAID.

Everything worked fine, and I’m using the proprietary nVidia drivers. The heavy emphasis on multimedia options (and the microATX form factor) makes this an excellent PVR chassis.

Wireless Card – SMC

The SMC has an Atheros chipset and is supported directly in recent linux kernels. I had to use wpa_supplicant to get WPA encrypted wireless connections working.

HDD – Seagate Barracuda 400GB Ultra ATA100

I screwed up and bought an IDE drive – woops. No big deal – it’s still plenty fast enough for recording live TV.

Processor – Athlon 64 LE-1620

This is a low power single core AMD 64-bit chip. I find myself doing more post-processing of video than I thought I would, so if I had it to do again I’d probably get a faster dual-core chip. BUT – this machine idles at 64 watts, so I should save some scratch on electricity in the long haul.

Capture Card – PVR-350

Excellent capture quality – but I had much trouble with the TV-out. It’d work fine for a few hours – then I’d lose red output and everyone would look like a smurf until I rebooted.

So I just started using the TV-out provided by the motherboard – and my problems disappeared. Were I to do it again, I’d either buy two of the cheaper PVR-150s or the PVR-500 to get dual tuners.

A plus – the remote is high quality and works perfectly via lirc. Load is very low during video capture because of the PVR-350’s hardware MPEG decoder.

DVD – ASUS 18x DVD±R Burner

Not much to say – works fine and is darned quiet.

Memory – Crucial 1GB DDR2 667

This is plenty of RAM – after a month it essentially never hits the swap file.

Things I’d do differently

I alluded to some of this above, but:

• I’d get two cheaper PVR-150s or the more expensive PVR-500. TV-out on the PVR-350 was buggy for me, has a low maximum resolution and is handled admirably by the motherboard. More than once I’ve wanted to watch live TV while recording – but I’ve found as my library has increased this happens less often.
• I MIGHT get a faster dual-core AMD processor. It’s not a problem and I’m patient, but for an hour-long show the post-processing for commercial detection and transcoding takes about an hour. Slow, but tolerable.
• You can’t have enough HDD space. I’d get a larger hard drive.
• I would use a standard Debian Etch install instead of Knoppmyth. Now that the system is working the way I want, I’ve realized that Knoppmyth really didn’t do anything I couldn’t have, and I may have saved some time starting with Debian Etch proper. But – if you’re not a Debian zealot like myself, you really can’t go wrong with Knoppmyth.

Notes

I transcode video after recording, shrinking it to about 60% of its original size. I can store 14+ days of TV. ARMAGEDDON, HERE I COME!

I switched the default desktop from XFCE (or whatever it was) to my currently preferred KDE – I’ve got plenty of RAM, and I wanted to use Amarok to stream my music collection from my OpenBSD firewall/router/home server. Sound is piped out through my (somewhat old) component stereo and is excellent.

I do not know what I did before commercial auto-skip. I cannot stand watching TV now without it. Were MythTV made of the blood of innocents, I’d still use it because of commercial auto-skip.

This system would serve as an excellent chassis for pretty much any MythTV system – it’s got tons of room, it’s very quiet and the motherboard gives you a ton of connection options – with excellent linux support (proprietary drivers aside).

When I record, transcode and watch TV at the same time, load averages around 1. Very impressive.

Currently I have standard cable. My next upgrades will be a HD Tuner and HD cable – along with a much bigger HDD and a filesystem managed via LVM.

I am ridiculously happy with this system – it’s changed how I watch TV, listen to music and is worth every penny. I cannot say enough good things about it – and because of prudent hardware choices it was quite easy to set up.

If you’re looking to create a MythTV system, this’d be a great place to start.