TimsBlog

Ok I was tired of burning DVD’s just so I could watch my Tv shows and Movies in the bedroom before I slept. Its about 36 cents a disc now. Thats almost $11 a month!. Bad very Bad. Lets go over the alternative options.

Option One buy a laptop. Its the 21^st century right might as well. Well I covered that one in a post a few days ago. I’m only willing to spend $1000 to $1200. The selection in that range for a small ultra portable wide screen (yeah I’m picky) is a battle between battery and computing power. Ba terries lasting on the low end around 2 hours! Weak When you get into the 3.5 to 4 hour range the computing power lacks a bit. Scratch that one for now.

Option Two would be to set up a WIFI network to stream it to the bedroom to a computer. I have basically another PC with all the old parts from when I upgrade to my current PC in January. Actually could build 2 PC from spare parts if I split my RAM into 512 per machine. This would leave me with a hulking Pc box in the bedroom just to watch movies. Not to mention the router would be about $100 for WIFI unless I bought a hardwire one for $30. Then I’d have to run wire in the antic about 35 feet to the bedroom. Uh no and no.

The final solution! No not the plan the Nazi had, but a combination of option one and two. I built yet another hack in the box media center. This time I didn’t go the micro motherboard route I used a full size motherboard. I shoved it into a Teac CD player cia 1991 and ta da! I have a medica Pc that is no bigger than my DVD player and it cost NOTHING!

I did the honorable thing and researched all the linux operating systems to get the best OS for the box. I like mythTv and the other brands of linux distros. I just didn’t need all that extra stuff they do. They are mainly a tivo “do it yourself box”. Made and geared for storing/ripping TV/cable/bittorrent to the box for later viewing. All I wanted was a nice layout for a TV and a media player software. I gave myself a huge headache learning about installing linux and even installed a few distro’s.

I ended up shoving XP with an ATI All in Wonder TV tuner card I don’t watch TV on it with the tnnner but the remote and media player is nice. I use my USB drive to transfer up to 1Gb of shows onto the box which gives me about 80 to 90 minutes of shows to watch. Takes about 2 minutes to transfer.

Did I mention option 3 was Free?

Stats:

Teac CD Player case cia 1991

AMD 2400 CPU

Gigabyte G-N400 Pro2 Motherboard

1 GB pc2700 Ram

Maxtor 80 GB SATA Hard Drive

ATI All in Wonder Video Card (not pictured)

300 Watt Power Supply

For the rest of the photos goto my flickr Set