I ran a tivo in the states, and I can tell you that it's a wonderful gadget to have. There is a project called mythtv out there now that does all that and more now, well worth checking out:
I'd like to put one of these together in a mini ITX and just use it with my LCD screen to watch telly etc on.
Another really sexy way to do this is to locate a cheap dvd player that has an IDE DVD drive in it.. easier said than done perhaps.. but you take out the guts of the dvd player, hook up the ITX board inside and leave the IDE DVD drive in place, looks rather nifty. I even know of folks who've re-connected the LEDs to make everything look like a normal player!
I also recall that some of these mini or micro ITX boards have a bios that will play a dvd or music cd/mp3 cd-rom right after POST if it's detected, I thought that was a very cool feature too
DB
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Dan Beimborn wrote:
Another really sexy way to do this is to locate a cheap dvd player that has an IDE DVD drive in it.. easier said than done perhaps.. but you take out the guts of the dvd player, hook up the ITX board inside and leave the IDE DVD drive in place, looks rather nifty. I even know of folks who've re-connected the LEDs to make everything look like a normal player!
Any of the Cyberhome players that Richer Sounds sell have IDE DVD drives. I bought my parents one last year. Not a bad player, but picture quality is not as good as my Panasonic!
Chris
Chris Glover wrote:
Any of the Cyberhome players that Richer Sounds sell have IDE DVD drives. I bought my parents one last year. Not a bad player, but picture quality is not as good as my Panasonic!
Well the trick would be to get one where the overall price of the unit is roughly akin to an ITX case & dvd IDE drive.. that way the picture would be entirely controlled by your computer output and you'd just chuck the "innards" of the player aside from the DVD-ROM. In many of them in the states, the power supplies were adequate to power the mainboard/computer as well!
Price-wise, do they have any around the £50-60 mark? That's about right for a decent DVD drive + case enclosure for such a project!
The ideal would be a drive that doesn't have hardware region coding too. In windows (spit) I have a tool that lets me set an "Emulated" region coding on the drive so I can use USA/UK/etc dvds. Sure would be nice to do the same on an ITX box with linux, does anyone in the LUG know about region-coding etc as applies to linux (does it apply?)?
Another really clever thing MythTV includes is a MAME frontend, turning your little ITX box also into a game machine; and I believe it uses the audio outs to play your ogg/mp3 music from the same interface as the PVR layout
DB
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Chris Glover -
Dan Beimborn