[ale] semi OT: ideas about building a PVR/XPC

[Christopher Bergeron]

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I recommend the new VIA EPIA-M board for this.  I have one and aside 
from it's "tiny" size, it can play DVD's just fine.  It has an XCard 
MPEG2 decoder chip built onto the board, but the linux drivers are still 
in development.  It has all the goodies: eth, firewire, 6 channel audio, 
4usb ports (but linux sees 6 somehow - maybe the chip supports 6).  I 
got mine at casetronic.com for $245 for a sweet little case, dc 
powersupply(NO FAN), and the board/cpu.  You can buy the EPIA-M board 
for just over $100US at lots of places.  I recommend starting at 
http://www.linitx.com

Regards,
CB




Geoffrey wrote:

| lance crocker wrote:
|
|> Hey all,
|>
|> I am planning on building a PVR ( Personal video recorder - like Tivo 
), an
|> XPC ( Multimedia entertainment PC that will hockup to my TV and home
|> theater ), or some sort of combination.
|>
|> I have thought of two basic choices for this attempt.
|>
|> 1. Buy an Xbox, hack it and install Xbox linux on it ( roughly around 
$300 )
|
|
| Do not, under any circumstances, put money in M$'s pocket, even though 
they are losing money on the Xbox.
|
|>
|> or
|>
|> 2. Build an XPC using current high end PC hardware  ( roughly around 
$1700 )
|>
|> The Xbox idea is cheap but not very upgradable. The XPC idea is more
|> expensive but also more upgradable and mroe useful.
|>
|> Have any of you guys ever built anything like this? Have any suggestions
|> like recommeneded hadrware? software? OS? stuff like that?
|>
|> I would really appreciate some input as I have just started seriously
|> thinking about this.
|>
|> Thanks in advance,
|>
|> Lance
|>
|>
|> _______________________________________________
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|> Ale at ale.org
|> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
|>
|>
|

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