MythTV Box Built as Open Source

The MythTV has the ability to rip DVD movies to its hard drive and play them on demand although it was intended primarily to be a PVR.

An old hardware was resued to buid the MythTV box which contains Asus A7V400-MX motherboard, AMD Athlon XP Mobile 2500+ processor, 512MB PC2700 (DDR333) memory, and GeForce4 MX440-8x AGP video card. The processor was underclocked and run as slow as possible to create less heat from the processor. Since a 750MHz is more than capable of ripping and playing movies, it helps lower the temperatures in the computer.

The case must be unobtrusive so the AOpen A340A aluminum MicroATX slim case was used. The case was made to stand vertically next to the TV where the power supply is located at the top of the case.The CPU cooler operates at 21dBA since the MythTV box must be operate silently. As convection brings it to the top, the PSU fan exhausts the hot air. The Seagate ST3120026A 120GB hard drive was chosen for the storage since it is large enough to store the ripped movies. A Samsung TS-H352A is the DVD ROM drive used.

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