[Gllug] mini-itx & usb wifi & mythtv & DVB-T stuff

Huw Lynes huw-l at moving-picture.com
Mon Feb 21 10:09:31 UTC 2005


On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:20:08 +0000
SteveC <steve at fractalus.com> wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> After 3 years with a mac laptop I want to get a linux box again.
> 
> I'm thinking a mini-itx since they're small and cheaper than I thought.
> Normally I'd build it myself but I've not touched one of these before.
> Is it significantly cheaper building it than buying a pre-built box?
> Does anyone have component / supplier reccomendations? Any gotchas I
> should look for? I looked at the sites google.co.uk threw back looking
> for 'mini-itx buy linux' including cheeplinux.

For maximium flexibility you want a box with both a PCI and AGP slot. Shuttles
and some of the hushpc models have this setup. The downside to shuttles is
that they are noisy. mini-itx based on via cpus are much quieter but have less
horsepower. In the end I gave up on small cases and went for a hulking great
Antec case with lots of drives and an Athlon64. It's much quieter than my
shuttle.

> I'd like it to drive a 17" LCD for working on, but also a TV for myth
> TV. I was thinking of getting something like HAUPPAUGE WINTV NOVA-T PC.
> pci card. eg something that does mpeg-2 onboard but I't like it to have
> PAL or scart output and DVB-T (eg freeview) input. 

I have two NOVA-T cards in the MythTV box I'm currently building. They will
capture freeview but they rely on the CPU to do the encoding so you are going
to want a CPU with more horses than a via. I think the TV-OUT on the NOVA-T is
just an aerial pass-through. You will need TV-OUT on the graphics card. Which
is why having an AGP slot is handy. A lot of terrestrial TV capture cards do
have the feature-set you are looking for but don't decode digital TV.

> Is that possible?
> Anyone got mythtv set up with a card capable of doing freeview? Also,
> anyone know how sensitive freeview is to tv aerial set up?

The NOVA-T is reported to work quite well although at the moment it requires
kenel patches. I'm still trying to get lirc working at which point I'll
actually plug mine into the arial and find out if I've wasted my money.

> I need wifi, so I'm thinking pci card, or usb dongle. Any experience
> with usb wifi? bit of a crappy solution I think, so I;m thinking a 2-pci
> slot box, one for wifi, one for tv card.
> 
> I'm thinking I need
> 
> case
> motherboard (fanned, something 1.2 Ghz)
> (slim?) cd/dvd
> pci riser depending on case?
> power supply
> 1 gig ram

An AGP slot will make your life easier.
1Gb of RAM is overkill. 


-- 
| Huw Lynes               | The Moving Picture Company  |
| System Administrator    | 127 Wardour Street          |
|.........................| London, W1F 0NL             | 


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