LeeMobile

My parts came in and I found some time this weekend to assemble my HTPC. I’ll explain some little things I found in my weekend project.

Hardware:

As I mentioned earlier blog post, the whole rig ended up costing me a little over $500 after taxes and shipping. For those interested, the specs for my machine are:

• Generic value Biostar motherboard. ~ $60
• 1 Gig of Value DDR2 RAM ~$30
• AMD Athlon X2 3800+ CPU ~$90
• 250 Gig SATA Hard Drive ~$80
• Generic DVD-ROM ~$25
• Antec NSK2400 Case ~$100
• nVidia GeForce 7200 GS ~$60
• Microsoft MCE USB Remote ~$35

As you can see, I avoided “high end” parts, as I’m not looking for performance here for my system. Watching movies and listening to music doesn’t demand much performance, so there’s no need to break the bank for expensive parts when they’re not needed. With today’s modern CPU’s, a “value” CPU goes a long way. Also, most of the low end components generate little heat and in effect, little noise.

There are some things I would change though if I had to rebuy everything again. I would’ve bought the EE (energy efficient) version of the AMD CPU, which draws only 65 Watts of power. I also could have avoided buying a video card if I bought a motherboard that had integrated component out. I am very happy with the 7200 GS video card though, as I bought it specifically for the fact that it has no fan.

One very nifty thing about the Microsoft Remote Control is that it comes with two infrared sensors that effectively turn the remote into a floating mouse. It acts exactly like Nintendo’s WiiMote, which is super handy for navigating around the desktop while sitting on your couch. I haven’t set up that functionality yet, but it is supported on Linux.

The Antec NSK2400 case is very slick for the living room. It looks like a piece of home theatre equipment, and like most Antec cases I’ve come across, it’s very well built with lots of attention to details. The hard drive and optical drives are stored in separate compartments, with little racks for quick installation. You just slide the drives into the racks and tighten the screws, and voila, your drives are mounted to the case nicely. The case also comes with quiet fans and a power supply that’s near silent too. All in all, the NSK2400 is a great case and a great buy at only $100.

After installation, the entire rig was near silent. Without the little blue power light, I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s on or not in my living room.

Software:

Now you must be wondering, how hard would it be to install Linux, MythTV, and get it running to be a fancy home theatre PC? Have no fear, cause I’ve blazed this trail this weekend and it turns out that it’s not all that bad.

Ubuntu has been THE Linux distribution for user friendliness and ease of use. It also is very active and has a ton of support since it’s become so popular. Hell, the Linux installation base doubled this year and I’m going to make the safe assumption that this is due to Ubuntu. I have played around with other distros, but to get something up quick and fast, I like Ubuntu.

However, when I say installation isn’t “that bad”, I mean to say that you will have to do a little legwork to get it up and running. This basically means that you will have to open up the command line console and follow instructions to get things working. Also, you may have to open up some config files in a text editor to make some changes. However, the semantics behind the commands are things you don’t have to actually know. You don’t need to know “what” is happening when you run things, it’s just that you have to step through the instructions. You only need to be capable enough to follow simple instructions like:

1) Open a command console.

2) Copy and Paste this exact command: “sudo apt-get install mythtv-themes”

If you can do that, then you can get it up and running. You may run into some driver issue if you are using obscure hardware, but if you use run-of-the-mill mainstream stuff it should simply work out of the box. If you have hardware that is less popular, you may have to do some Google sleuthing to see if someone has run into this problem and has solved the issue.

As I’ve mentioned, due to Ubuntu’s popularity, if there is a driver issue that hasn’t been resolved in a release, someone probably will have. It also helps that Ubuntu is updated and released once every 6 months, so most issues are resolved pretty quickly. Though the new release (7.10) is coming out in a week, I couldn’t wait to get my box up and running so I settled for 7.04.

It took me only about 20 minutes to install Ubuntu onto the box. All of which required me to hit “OK” and “Next” about 3 times and to choose the hard drive partition I wanted to install to, and then letting the installer do its thing.

Upon booting up on Ubuntu, I couldn’t get my wireless card to connect to the network correctly. However, on the Fiesty (7.04) quick start page it mentioned that I might have to disable a module to get it to work. This sounds “tricky”, but it involved nothing more than me copying and pasting the one command I needed into the command line. Ubuntu comes with a handy graphical tool that’s very similar to Windows XP’s wireless network tool. You just click on the network you want to use, and off it goes.

Next, I couldn’t seem to get my integrated sound to work. I Googled the device that’s on my motherboard and found a thread on the Ubuntu forums explaining that I’d have to download the drivers and install them to get it working. Realtek, the brand for my integrated sound, had Linux drivers on their website. I downloaded them and ran the installer. A minute later I had glorious sound!

I proceeded to read the instructions on how to install mythTV from this site: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV

The Ubuntu documentation is very well written, and catered for us “newbies”. It even walks you through all the steps to get Ubuntu installed and setup. I followed the instructions a bit, and about an hour later I had MythTV up and running. I had to tinker around with some config files to get the remote working exactly the way I wanted, so that added about another hour’s worth of time.

I also configure some other bits to tie up loose ends. I installed SSH, so that I could configure the box from my main PC. I also installed all the codecs required to play various video files (mkv, xvid, divx, etc…) and I got SAMBA up and running to share files over the network with my windows box.

MythTV

MythTV is very slick.

It comes with an RSS aggregator so that you can get your news/blog feeds delivered to you in the living room. It also had channel guide listings, which it grabs from the internet. I didn’t test this, as I don’t have cable, but I could see it being super handy to browse and set your recordings for the PVR and general TV watching functionalities.

It even comes with its own web-browser, so if you had a wireless keyboard+mouse in the living room you could surf the ‘net within it using any browser you fancy. And it has a weather lookup plugin, which I couldn’t get to work. Apparently, it grabbed its data from msnbc, and msnbc had changed their XML data. So unless you do a little coding to get it up, the weather feature doesn’t work until the next release of MythTV.

Unfortunately I don’t have cable TV, so I couldn’t test its PVR abilities. Which I guess are its main features, but playing my videos on it have been a dream.

Conclusions

After $500 and about 6 hours setup time (including hardware install). I was able to getan HTPC running in my living room playing high def video to my TV.

Considering that TiVo costs $300US for an HD version + a monthly subscription, Bell sells their PVR box for $550, and the fact that an HTPC is an all purpose computer, it’s pretty hard to deny the value that a cheap HTPC can gbring you.

As for software, Ubuntu + MythTV offer a strong combination of user friendliness, cost ($0), and functionality. Albeit, setting it up is not for the impatient. It is definitely more involving to get it up and running than Windows Media Center edition. Whereas Windows MCE may have taken me 2-3 hours to get up, this whole project took me about 5-6.

However, the end product is much nicer. As MythTV evolves and grows, and with Ubuntu versions getting hammered out every 6 months, it won’t take long before installation time is shorter and features become even more slick. With Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in a few days, I might give that a twirl sometime soon. I’m fairly certain that someone in the community will streamline the installation to the point where you just run a script and everything will be setup for you, it’ll happen eventually (I’m just too lazy to make it myself :-p).

You cannot overlook the tweakability of a computer either. With a little tinkering, you can get a lot of features that you want that you can’t do with a black box. You’re not locked in by hardware, and with Linux, you have pretty much free reign as to how you want things set up.

So is it worth the cost + time to get a htpc up? Without a doubt. You get PVR functionality without the monthly fee, at roughly the same cost. Add in the fact that it does way more than what a standard PVR does, then surely it’s a great investment. However, even with a Windows MCE install, it does take a little bit of time to get things setup. In the end though, the investment in time should be well worth it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 5:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.