Pure Digital Thought

I’m really into the idea of having some sort of media box to put stuff I like onto my nice Samsung HLR-6178. So, I’m basically down to whether I’ll be using some flavor of Linux with mythTV or give in to the dark side and go with Microsoft Media Center.

My original intention for a media box was to come up with a way to put all of my DVDs onto a hard drive. I’m really lazy about DVDs and that is the fault of TimeWarner’s VideoOnDemand. See, I’m really into the idea of watching a movie without having to use much more effort than hitting the select button on the remote. If I have to get up, walk across the room, dig through a pile of DVDs, open the case, load into the 5-disc changer (yeah I have one and 5 disc ain’t enough dammit), and *then* finally hit play; I’ve gone through too much effort. So, I was looking to invest in a couple of massive 500GB drives so I could store all of my DVDs on them. My first choice was some sort of Linux distro and I found KnoppMyth which is an interesting distro that’s all setup to easily configure a MythTV box for you. I tried out the DVD ri…. uh… optical-to-hardrive-reconfiguring software and I had a few issues. It seems like it didn’t like the DVD drive I had and the DVDs that did play looked like crap. So, I canned KnoppMyth for the moment. Maybe it will get better with age.

It pains me to type this but I’ve recently been leaning towards Windows Media Center. Sonic has what is touted to be the best DVD decoder ever. It used to be called CineMaster but it looks like after being acquired by Sonic they changed it to CinePlayer and even made a plugin for Windows Media Player. I also want a smooth nice interface and Windows MCE has a nicer interface than mythTV. This isn’t a huge surprise as Windows has always looked nicer than Linux as Unix interfaces historically look like they are the marriage between an ugly stick and this guy.

I was intending on perhaps cutting out the DVR functionality from my media box but I’ve recently come into somewhat of a problem. See, after convincing my wife that we needed to get an HDTV-DVR from TimeWarner, she’s found that she cannot live without it. She’s basically taken it over and has several shows a day being recorded. Yes, we actually have a DVR with dual tuners and have somehow managed to outgrow that. The upside is that much of her stuff we can catch from an over-the-air tuner. So, plan B (plan A was getting the DVR in the first place) is to build a box where I can slop in a couple of HDTV tuners and actually be able to record my content on the cable box once again.

I’ve priced it out and much of the components are cheap. I won’t be buying some pre-built piece of crap as that will only break sooner and trap me into an inability to upgrade later when we somehow outgrow having 4 HDTV tuners. The only problem are the HDTV tuners. I may have to remortgage my house to afford them :-P. Actually, they run about $600 a pop. So, dual tuner rings the price up to about double the initial $1100 cost. Sigh. I think I may build a DVD library box and look into adding the tuners later when they don’t cost so much.

I’ll keep planning this all out and if you happen to have an experiences with good media hardware drop me a comment. I’ve got some good resources and I’d sure appreciate any more info especially if you happen to have a Windows Media Center already.