$500 Mythbox Project

Message

mythboxguy · Post by **mythboxguy** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 12:50 pm

Hey guys,

I have been asked by friends and coworkers if I could clone or reproduce my Mythbox. A few people have actually offered me money to build them boxes. I set out on a project to build the best, most upgradable, remotely supportable, modular mythbox I could build for under $500. I am assuming you have no parts and are too lazy or would not understand most of the uber gentoo handbook.

I chose the most available, best price point parts and set out on this journey. When I am done, I will hopefully have a nice Mythbox, complete with Stage4 clonability and all kinds of other bells and whistles.

I am documenting the project on my ghetto website in a pseudo bloglike format with all kinds of pictures and what I consider comedy.

No doubt I could use some tweaking tips once things are settled. I plan on using this post as a place to ask questions and of course answer questions about my funny little project.

Here is the site:

http://www.ubershirt.com

Thanks for your Support:

Mythboxguy

Earthwings · Post by **Earthwings** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 1:21 pm

Moved from Multimedia to Gentoo Chat. Let's keep chat about your project in this thread. If you have support requests, please open new threads (if search doesn't reveal results of course).

ChojinDSL · Post by **ChojinDSL** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 4:29 pm

Nice Guide so far!

I think just yesterday I saw a website from the UK where someone was doing the exact same thing, i.e. selling a pre-built mythTV box. Interestingly that guy also chose to use gentoo linux.

Allthough Im kinda wondering if something like Knoppmyth wouldnt spare you a lot of the hassle?

mythboxguy · Post by **mythboxguy** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 8:12 pm

I explored using knoppmyth a few times and ran into a few problems. I love knoppix but I am not very good at remastering. I have about 30 cdr coasters that will speak to that.

Last time I tried was 3 months ago, I will definately investigate knoppmyth on the exact box I am documenting, see what happens.

Thanks for the input.

ChojinDSL · Post by **ChojinDSL** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 11:54 pm

Ive never tried Knoppmyth myself before, I just saw it being used in the creation of a HDTV capable MythTV box on that tech show "systm" (The same guys who made "The Broken").

I figured that since Knoppmyth has wizards that speed along the installation process, it should save you time, but if your needs require you to tinker, then by all means stick to gentoo. Thats what its made for after all.

Case in point: I would love to use a simple binary desktop distro for my laptop, because of the constantly changing environment a laptop is usually in. But since my laptop has a funky combination of hardware, no matter which distro I choose, I would have to tinker to get it all working. So I stuck with gentoo for my laptop.

For my desktop, gentoo all the way of course.

(That goes without saying...)

daemonb · Post by **daemonb** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 1:15 pm

Can i run external programs like gpsdrive from mythtv?
Is there any possibility for an onscreen keyboard?

thank you

DaemonB

cboyd · Post by **cboyd** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:32 pm

Keep it going. One of my coworker noobs tried to do this in Fedora Core recently and he failed miserably. He's about to give up, but I sent him your link this morning. We'll see if your article helps him rekindle his spirit. Good work!

InfinityX · Post by **InfinityX** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:47 am

Okay I'm convinced, great guide, I'm going to have to build me one of these. Just a couple of newbie questions:

- do I really need a graphics card? I've chosen a great slimline micro-ATX case that uses a PCI riser, which means I can only fit the TV card in there, will the integrated graphics of the mobo be enough?
- how do I know if the TV card will actually work with my digital TV supplier? Is it all standardised?

mastergoon · Post by **mastergoon** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 12:47 am

you are at least going to want a graphics card with s-video or component out probably

pyrobrit · Post by **pyrobrit** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 11:47 am

mastergoon wrote:you are at least going to want a graphics card with s-video or component out probably

You will find many people using the "ASUS Pundit" barebone PC case which has a built in VGA / DVI / S-Video and Composite outputs. With 2 PCI slots you can just fit in two PVR250 cards for recording two shows simultaneously.

The motherboard can even handle hardware MPEG decoding which takes a small load off the cpu. Have a look at the MythTV mailing lists for more information.

Regards

Nick.W

hollywoodcole · Post by **hollywoodcole** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 8:55 pm

Watch this!
http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/

Very good How-to, and its all under $500!

hollywoodcole · Post by **hollywoodcole** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 12:46 pm

This Guy is even better, b/c he is using Gentoo to build his box.

http://www.ubershirt.com/mythbox.html

bbe · Post by **bbe** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 1:53 pm

hollywoodcole wrote:This Guy is even better, b/c he is using Gentoo to build his box.

http://www.ubershirt.com/mythbox.html

Thats the guy who started the thread...

hollywoodcole · Post by **hollywoodcole** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 5:26 pm

duh!

Didn't see his link there.

So when are you going to finish the how-to?

rajjon · Post by **rajjon** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 4:43 pm

The link isnt working for me

Is there any "backup"-site for this one?

C.M · Post by **C.M** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 9:55 am

Guess his DotEasy account expired or something. Too bad, was a good read and I'd like to see how it went.

/C.M

tmske · Post by **tmske** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 11:55 am

If you really want to read it, you can use google cache (no pictures although)

hollywoodcole · Post by **hollywoodcole** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 3:59 pm

Mythboxguy,

If your looking for space an bandwidth, I can really help you out! I can spare one of my dedicated servers for your site!

Just send me and email.

rajjon · Post by **rajjon** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 9:23 pm

Nice guide so far!

outspoken · Post by **outspoken** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 2:50 pm

the guide actually got a lot of press, either by word of mouth or email.

nice work on the system though, look forward to seeing the rest of your howto.

also, good luck with getting your host back up.

yakapiece · Post by **yakapiece** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 6:33 pm

I'm just wondering now that google's cache no longer makes this page available when might this howto go back up. I wanted to look to it for ideas.

Thank you!

outspoken · Post by **outspoken** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 4:06 pm

what was the url of the original document? you can always look for webproxy sites on google and then plug in the url there...

this one: http://www.ubershirt.com/mythbox.html - is no good, because he wrote over the original content with a junk message.

Hamman · Post by **Hamman** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:06 pm

Ehm... it redirects you after 10 seconds (it says on the page). Maybe this doesn't work for you? Or am I missing something? Anyways, here's the URL to the new site:
http://myth.sqwaw.com/mythbox.html

yakapiece · Post by **yakapiece** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:58 pm

No, he just got it back up within the last few days.

Great! Thanks

mythboxguy · Post by **mythboxguy** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 2:32 am

Yup, the site is back up sorta.

I hope to make some significant progress on the guide this week. Stay tuned. Oh yeah, try to use the original site for linkage just in case my new host gets beat down and I have to redirect again.

Jay

P.S. The gentoo community and this forum rocks. I can't believe how many pieces of extremely obscure information I found around here.

$500 Mythbox Project

$500 Mythbox Project

$500 knoppymyth

Hey Y'all - Thanks for sticking around