Over the last few weeks I've been quietly putting together a media centre. I made a few mistakes along the way, but it's now at the point where it's fully functioning except for automatic shutdown and wakeup, which I'm still working on.
Obviously a media center has to be very quiet, so I spent some time selecting quiet hardware. The case I ended up with is this one:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130945 . It's not particularly pretty, but it's clean and inoffensive, and big enough for plenty of stuff inside. With the fans running at their lowest speed, everything stays nice and cool.
The motherboard is an Asus M2NPV-VM (now discontinued by EBuyer, I seem to have a talent for picking these
). I chose this as it has good quality onboard sound and graphics (nVidia, the best choice for Linux) and a full complement of TV and monitor connectors. The processor is Athlon 64 X2 4200 with 2 GB of RAM.
Another potentially noisy component is the hard disk, and I chose a Western Digital WD5000AAKS (500 GB SATA) and it's proved to be an excellent choice, fast and silent.
The CPU cooler was my first mistake. I chose one on the basis of low noise and good customer reviews, but after I fitted it I found that it was too tall for the case. I would have had to cut a hole in the lid, which didn't seem a good idea. Being impatient to get it going, I rushed out to PC World where I found a very nice quiet cooler at a rather high price.
Tuners. I wanted two, so I could watch one program while recording another, and I chose the Hauppauge Nova-T 500. With a bit of fiddling this worked very well, but it proved to be unstable - after some channel-hopping it would stop receiving anything until it was re-booted. I think that this is a problem with the Linux driver, which was supposed to be fixed but doesn't seem to be. After trying out a few others, I ended up with an old Hauppauge Nova-T PCI and a Nova-T USB stick plugged in the back. These both work well, and the latter gives me the option of taking it out and plugging it into a laptop, so I can watch TV anywhere there's a good enough signal for the little stick aerial.
The operating system which I ended up with after trying several was MythBuntu. This is a dedicated version of Ubuntu, with MythTV preconfigured as the user interface. MythTV is a pig to set up manually, but has a wealth of features which I think put it way ahead of anything comparable. Getting it all working wasn't completely plain sailing of course, but the community support is first rate, and I've now got a system I'm fairly proud of. In use it's just like any other set-top box, controlled entirely by the remote control. I can watch and record TV, and recordings have automatic advert skipping. All the expected live viewing features are there, such as pause and skip-back. Recordings can be scheduled from the EPG.
As well as TV the machine can play and record CDs and DVDs, receive and transmit streaming video and audio over the network, and it's even got a built-in web browser and news reader. As I said, the one feature which I have yet to get working is automatic shutdown and wakeup, but I know it can be done.
Would I recommend this route to anyone else? I think it's fair to say that you do have to have a bit of experience with Linux. There's nothing particularly difficult if you're used to Linux, but it's definitely not a simple install-and-go. Very satisfying though.