The original idea behind the Minion series of computers that I have built has always been for them to function as living room multimedia computers, integrated as much as possible with my home theater system, providing core storage for all types of media, including music, videos and games. The first two Minions have been largely successful, thanks to both nVidia’s decent TV-out support and my girlfriend’s addition of an ATI TV Wonder card for doing video capture.
However, I never really got into the video capture stuff much myself (just enough to make it work), and I realize I’m falling behind the times.
My friend Dave has clued me in to a very promising software suite for PVR stuff called MythTV. It provides a full-featured PVR as well as all kinds of other useful media modules, such as a video player, DVD player, music player, games menu (for MAME, other emulators, and PC games), weather and newsfeeds. In short, it is TiVo on crack. (If you’re not excited yet, take a look at the screenshots.)
It’s also open source and based on Linux. Since I had been planning to build a Linux-based 1TB+ RAID5 server anyway, it seems like a perfect fit and natural extension of my existing plan to set it up as a MythTV machine. No more VCRs, no more tapes, no more annoying encoding with VirtualDub. Anything we record is on the hard drive, ready to go. And if there are any deficiencies or bugs in the interface, I’m well qualified to fix things and submit those improvements to the MythTV developers. (It’s past time I get involved in some sort of open source effort.)
Lastly, my research indicates I can build this system for less than $2,000. Whoo hoo! Minion III, here I come!