Hardware: Epia MythTV Custom Build

This has taken me a little longer to finish that I wanted, mainly because other things took over and it ended up sitting on my desk for a few weeks - but it is finally finished. I'd like to think Ewan at Mini-ITX.com for supplying a few of the things for this piece - notably the super low height memory. If you want to keep up with the world of Mini ITX, and find some unique products for embedded DIY projects - check them out

This is what I started with - a Netgear FVS318 that turned flaky on me a few years ago. I opened up the device and removed the motherboard. I then desoldered the original RJ45 connection, and the 12V power connector, for later use.

From the EPIA, I desoldered the serial port, both PS/2 ports and the RJ45 port, to bring the overall height of the board down. I then worked out the pinout of the RJ45 connection and wired some CAT5 directly onto the motherboard. I tested it using a pre-crimped lead at first, before eventually soldering on the RJ45 connection that came off the original router. I has some problems using a USB keyboard in the BIOS (which turned out to be the keyboard at fault), but I also resoldered in a PS/2 connector to the board, in case I needed it.

I then replaced the heatsink on the North/South bridge using a heatsink from a Pentium 75MHz, cut in two and held in place with some Arctic Silver paste and a spot of super glue. I didn't feel I needed heatsinks quite so big and it bought the height down to the required level. I also removed the fan from the CPU. A gutsy choice, but CPU usage is incredibly low when using MythTV and I really wanted something passive. If it starts getting too hot,I'll underclock the CPU. Unless a rogue process starts going crazy, I think I'll be fine.

You'll also notice I had some fun with the PicoPSU. It was unfortunately just too high to fit in the case, so I desoldered the ATX connector and resoldered on an ATX connector with wires (from a dead PSU), bringing the height down nicely. I also soldered on the original 12V connector that the router used, so I could integrate it into the back panel better.

To power the PicoPSU, I used a generic laptop charger I had lying around.

To mount the motherboard in the case, I went a little crazy with the glue gun, which is also how I mounted the RJ45 and 12V connectors back into their original places. I'm using a 5GB Seagate micro hard drive to house the Xubuntu install, which I removed from its casing. If I didn't have it hanging around, I would have used a 512MB USB stick and a RAM loading copy of MiniMyth. You'll notice the low-height memory that Mini-ITX supplied - this worked out at around £45 for a 512MB stick.

Using some white spray paint I got from Halfords, I gave the whole chassis a new look, and also took apart my TFT to spray the plastics to match.

Excuse the poorly focussed image, but you can see the back panel fits nicely where the original 8 ports where. The power switch is a random rubber push-button I found in my jar of bits - I vaguely recall it came from a Playstation controller!

Here you can see it from the front, where I think the overall effect is excellent. This is while I was installing Xubuntu, which is surprisingly different to its Gnome variant. But getting a MythTV Frontend setup was as simple as installing it via Synaptic and supplying the IP and MySQL details of the backend in the living room.

I bought myself some office partition walls and separated my bedroom into an office/bedroom. The upshot of this, is that all the time I spent making the device look pretty, was a bit of a waste as it ended up living under my bed out of sight, with the TFT mounted to the partition wall. But at least I have the option of bringing it out in the open at a later point

I'm using an £8 Cyberlink remote control, that detected as a USB Keyboard - so no messing around with LIRC. It works out of the box - I merely map "pause to "9" and "quit" to "0" as I never really use these keys. I then set up VLC to play videos as I found mplayer was a little jerky. I had to edit the vlcrc file to add the different key mappings in too.

I have also removed the LEDs from anything and everything in my bedroom (including the TFT) so that turning the monitor off is all that is needed for pitch blackness! Overall, it works perfectly and gave my strained eyes a rest

It gets it off the air, but I think it ALSO supports internet listings, so it can look further into the future.

MythTV is awesome. It's biggest drawback at the moment, is probably MythMusic!

Well, under full load I imagine it would struggle. But it's never much more than 10% IIRC.

I think it's 1.3GHz, 512MB DDR Ram, 5GB USB disk.

MythTV Backend, running on another Ubuntu box. If I used a USB Tuner, I'm sure I could run the whole thing on the box, that defeats the object for me.

1.6GHZ Pentium M. 2 x 500GB IDE Hard drives. It doesn't need a lot of CPU power to be a backend - except for transcoding and advert removal, which are optional. The frontend needs more as it has to do MPEG2 decoding - except the Via has hardware accelerated MPEG2 decoding.

Ewan @ Mini-ITX seemed to feel it was the lowest profile Mini-ITX machine he'd seen. I just measured it and it is 3.5cm high.

I have a power consumption measuring device in my living room - I'll unplug it later and see how much power it consumes when idle, as it is on 24/7 because of the slow boot up times (USB after all).

I'm using an ancient Hauppage from 1999 or something. If you Google around, you can find a compatibility list