The Platform
For its good looks and small size, I chose the Shuttle SK43G machine
pictured above. There are a few problems though.
The onboard video (VIA based chipset, unichrome adapter) did
not at the time have mpeg acceleration under linux even though TV out
seemed to work. Secondly, there is only 1 AGP port and 1 PCI
port. Otherwise, this system is just about perfect.
The CPU is an Athlon XP 2600+ and the system has 512MB Ram. I
use a 300 GB Maxtor 6l300R0. I use a 3 partition system, 6 GB for
the root, 512 MB for the swap, and the rest dedicated to the media
partition.
For Video Capture, I chose the
Hauppauge
PVR350
which contains an MPEG encoder and decoder and is a
PCI card. The PVR350 also includes a remote control IR
interface, and all the connections to connect to a source and TV.
Unfortunately, the PVR350 does not contain a suitable frambuffer
device to support X11, even with the latest software driver under
linux. Also, moving forward and backward in the video was very
unstable, so a second Video card using the AGP port is installed.
Turns out, this was the best solution since the addition of an
HDTV (Pioneed PDP 50" plasma) and the use of DVI out made connections
more interesting.
The
Second Video card is the Geforce FX6200 fanless AGP with 256MB Video
Ram. Beside supporting X11, It has MPEG Acceleration and XvMC, a
good driver (although binary), and a DVI output. All in all, this
card is the best overall solution for my low noise system.
To see the software configuration, click the "next" link to see which OS and how it was configured.