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PostPosted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 4:38 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jun 24, 2004 4:06 pm
Posts: 23
Here's my setup:

Mercury KOB740CFDMx motherboard with following features:
- SIS 740 chipset
- microATX form factor
- integrated (soldered-on) AMD Mobile Duron Processor w/fan
- on-board 10/100 ethernet
- on-board video output (D-sub only)
- on-board sound (speaker outputs only)
- 2 PCI slots (no AGP slots)
- only $80 USD!!!

to this I added:

Jaton GeForce4 MX440 PCI video card (s-video and composite output, $46)
Hauppauge PVR-250 retail ($120)
128 MB of DDR-266 ram (had laying around)
60 GB hard drive (had laying around)
generic DVD drive (had laying around)
3.5mm DIN <-> RCA audio wire adapters (for outputting and receiving sound)


I put all this in a generic microATX case, and VOILA! A one-box home-made DVR that functions perfectly. All it cost me was $246 USD plus a bunch of stuff I had laying around. With this setup, I can watch LiveTV, play DVDs, play emulated games, rip CDs and DVDs, schedule recordings, and all kinds of other things. The only thing I cannot do is record one thing while I watch another with LiveTV (since there's only one video capture card). But I can record off the satellite and watch over-the-air broadcasts at the same time, and vice versa, so it all works out fine.

Performance is exemplary considering the hardware. Both encoding and decoding are hardware accelerated, so everything runs very smoothly. All I had to do was edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file to accommodate for the video output on the GeForce4 MX card. I also had to type "insmod sis900" to get the network driver loaded initially. The rest of the installation went exactly as outlined in the KnoppMyth instructions, and the results are excellent. The included Hauppauge remote even worked right out of the box! What else could I ask for?

Things I would do differently:
A quieter case, perhaps with a fanless power supply, would be a big bonus. As it is, I have to hide the whole box behind doors in the wall unit to bring the noise down to tolerable levels. No big deal, since the IR sensor for the Hauppauge remote can be placed anywhere, but it's a shame to hide such a nice case.

Things I'm considering for the future:
I'll try and build a completely fanless and HD-less front end, and use these awesome and inexpensive motherboards as backends. With 2 capture cards per motherboard, I should be set for the whole house with 2 backends.


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