Here's how to build a silent MythTV Frontend. This is an excellent way to build a low power, "set-top" box to extend your MythTV media server to additional TV's in your home.
First let's take a step back, and cover my motivations for taking on this project. Then we'll cover how I built it.
MythTV is the type of thing where many people dip their toe into the water with some old hardware, then once hooked decide to get serious. For each one of us, "getting serious" may mean something different, but it many times starts out in a similar fashion.
My first MythTV Box was a combined front/backend (all-in-one) system on an old loud Pentium 2 400Mhz system with three hard drives and a PVR-350 card. It was enough to get me hooked, but had some issues that needed addressing in the "getting serious" phase that followed getting hooked on MythTV.
- It was a loud beast of a computer
Three hard drives humming. Even worse, you could tell when it started doing anything hard because the sound of the power supply fan that had become white noise to your ears would suddenly change frequency, making the noise very obvious. Not quite keep you awake at night loud and annoying, but certainly not optimal for a system that's left on all the time in a living room or bedroom setting. - Like most entry level DVR's, it had it's place; a singular place
You had to be in that place to watch it. MythTV is capable of so much more. The distributed nature of the MythTV's design lets you add additional frontends on your network for viewing in other rooms. - It was ugly as sin
Certainly, many true geeks don't care so much about the looks of devices like this. Form follows function, right? Well, at least for me, my MythTV box wasn't the type of thing I'd want to have on display in my living room when guests would come over. A large off-white mini-tower case missing the bay covers just doesn't fit in all that well next to my Toshiba Cinema Series TV, or any TV for that matter. And that's forgetting the noise problem.
Well, these challenges got the best of my technical mind, and I started on a quest that took way more of my time than I'd care to admit. I was bound and determined to build a completely silent MythTV Set-top box to act as a MythTV Frontend. It had to look at home in an entertainment rack, it had to play standard definition video from a MythTV backend located somewhere out of earshot, and it had to be silent. Not quiet, but silent.
It's sounds easy, right? Not so much. But that's why I'm writing this. It doesn't have to be hard. You can learn from my efforts and build your own MythTV set-top box using my experience as a guide, or just replicate it wholesale. This information can be used to build a disk-less linux system for a whole variety of uses, not just for a MythTV Frontend.
There were a bunch of challenges, not the least of which is figuring out which hardware fits the requirements and works well with MythTV. It's one thing to try MythTV on hardware you already have, but I wanted to be sure I had selected components with a good chance to working before I whipped out the plastic and started piling up charges.
The software was even harder. I wanted an "all-in-one" set-top device that wouldn't depend on other network services (like network boot) to function. My hardware solutions to this problem (hint: flash memory) placed restrictions on the software side of things that were difficult to tackle. It certainly was not a situtation where I could throw a MythDora or KnoppMyth CD in, do an auto-install, click "Next" a few times, and have a nicely working "embedded" system.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Let's move on to my core requirements and the solution I ended up with.
Build a Silent MythTV Frontend
Hardware:
Software:
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