notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

My summer project: Linux HTPC

I WILL BREAK THE REGULAR PROGRAMMING with a personal story: how I’ve built a custom Home Theatre PC and felt like I was 8 again, playing with Lego. That’s partly why I haven’t written much about neither CRM nor software delivery lately. Having taken a 4-week break from work - we’ve welcomed our second son Richard to our family - I’ve had some time for my own… things. This has been one of them.

It didn’t take me 4 weeks to build this thing but it surely felt like that. Read on.

1. Rationale

I’ve recently bought a 37″ Toshiba Regza and having always wanted my whole media library at my fingertips, thought about adding a network media player to the mix. Something like Netgear EVO8000: a wifi-enabled, Linux-based appliance that would connect my TV with all the digital music and video I’ve got stored on my PC. But then, I could build a whole computer for the price of EVO8000. And so I did, since:

  • an appliance works out of the box (ideally) but the boundaries set by the manufacturer are sometimes too tight; if it doesn’t play Matroska videos, that’s that: they won’t play
  • I haven’t built a PC in over 2 years; reading Scott Hanselman’s series on building his Dream Developer PC, I got green with envy: I had to do it, too

My thinking was: I was going to spend some time on it, time that wasn’t billable anyway, and I was going to put together a versatile HTPC that will play all video & audio formats, be controllable with a remote, host all our media until I add a NAS, and perform a couple of additional tasks (like automatically downloading podcasts I listen to, but I haven’t got to that yet).

With a rock-solid excuse, I went shopping.

2. Hardware

Finding a PC enclosure that doesn’t look like a Cinderella when sitting next to your classy home-video components is a chore. Getting a standard mid-tower case was a no-go: I want a computer in my living room, but it shouldn’t look like one. At least not to the casual observer.

I settled on a “book-size” barebone from Asus, the AM2-based P1-AH2, which doesn’t scream Style! but has a passable design and was supposed to be small. It’s not as small as I would have wanted, though; I am going to read the specs the next time more thoroughly (357 x 91 x 275 mm).

Why go the AMD route when everybody seems to be buying Core 2 Duos now? Simple: my intent has been to use the box for playback only, and any modern processor can do that. I would consider going Intel if I wanted to do video transcoding, but even then, I suppose the Athlon X2 would do. And given the performance edge new Intels have, AMD processors are dirt cheap. So I added the cheapest Sempron I could find, though, plus a single 512MB DDR2 stick.

With a simple DVD drive and a 1GB flash drive, I thought I was done. I wanted to run a pendrive Tux on the machine to eliminate the noice hard drives make but long story short, I couldn’t make that work. Therefore, I cannibalized my desktop PC and thrown in a PATA 80GB disk.

With that, I was ready to install the OS.

Next: Geexbox=>Mythbuntu=>Kubuntu, how to make the TV accept a video input from the PC via DVI-HDMI cable, installing software to make all that useful.

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August 13, 2007 | Filed Under Me & You, But Mostly Me 

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