[Wolves] silent media box

[kev adams]

Following Kevan's questions about creating a silent media box I thought I'd 
pass on my experience with a hauppauge media MVP.  It's a small set top box 
that you can pick up from ebay for about £30-£40 that runs linux which it 
fetches from a server each time it boots.  It's built to work with windows XP 
or 2000 but there's a great project in development at 
http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/
which allows you to boot the MVP from a linux system with a custom OS to 
replace the hauppauge original.  Just needs TFTP to transfer the MVP image & 
a DHCP server on the network.

I'm using knoppmyth so the tutorial at 
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=MediaMVP_LinuxHOWTO
was invaluable for my particular setup.  Just remember to add the line 
next-server YOUR-TFTP-IP;
to the DHCP config if you want DHCP to run on a different system - else the 
MVP will presume that TFTP is on the same server.  This is the only tricky 
part I found as all the documentation I came across glossed over it assuming 
you'd want to run tftp & DHCP on the same server.

I've set mine up as a frontend to mythTV but you can use it to playback loads 
of different audio, video or image files from an NFS mounted directory.  
Might be a good solution as you can keep the noisy server away from your 
listening environment?

I should post my experiences & weblinks for setting up mythTV & the MVP to the 
wiki soon as it's taken a lot of experimentation but I finally have a silent, 
low powered media system up & running.  As ever it's compromises all the way 
- if you want a silent system it's tricky to get the power to decode high 
quality video - the MVP can play back pre-recorded video though without a 
problem :~)

kev