VIA EPIA

How much power does a home server suck out of the wall each year? My old media server used 80 watts. Last year I put together a silent MythTV Frontend (set-top box.) It only uses about 18 watts of power. What if a full fledged MythTV server were built on the same platform?

• How much power could be saved?
• Would the performance be acceptable?
• How much money would it save in energy bills?

Motivated by my fairly new Kill-a-Watt power meter, I set out to build the system to answer these questions and see if the results would be a system I would want to stick with.

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.

I've already published an article or two about this device, but I've recently gotten a kill-a-watt and used it to measure the power usage on my Silent MythTV Frontend.

A Kill-a-Watt is a device that measures power usage at an outlet. I'll be measuring a few things with it that I'll probably be posting about over the next few months.

On of the problems with Linux is lack of good support for 802.11g cards due to lack of native driver support.

I wanted to run my MiniMyth based MythTV Frontend wirelessly, but MiniMyth didn't include any wireless driver support.

I decided to try a wireless gaming adapter instead of trying to build a custom MiniMyth build with support for a wireless card on Linux.

Booting MiniMyth from a Compact Flash card is a great way to build a Silent MythTV Frontend (As featured on LinuxDevices.com). Although many MiniMyth users boot their systems by booting over the network, this may add a level of complexity that you would prefer to avoid.

MiniMyth is essentially a client to connect to an existing MythTV server. If you need to build a MythTV server, start with my MythDora Install Screencast or Ubuntu to MythBuntu upgrade screencast. My Low power MythTV server article is also quite popular.

A compact flash card and a compact flash to IDE adapter can simplify the setup of MiniMyth and make the system more self contained.

VIA makes few very small mother intended for embedded multi-media systems. These motherboards in the VIA EPIA line are based on the C3 line of chips, and their successor. The C3 chip was previously known as the Cyrix Pentium III (compatible) chip. These motherboards have been known to be great starting points for building MythTV front ends.

Although the CPUs are generally slow and outdated by today's standards, VIA motherboards offer a few features of interest to MythTV users.