Building your own media box, part 1
Jan. 4, 2004
Watching DVDs and movies on my computer monitor was the best experience in the house. Our TV was only 13", whereas my monitor was a whopping 17". Sure, there was no couch in the study, but there were enough chairs around that 4-5 people could squeeze in for a movie. Of course, when I bought a new 27" TV this past October, watching movies on my monitor became much less appealing. What was I to do?
Motivation
A reasonable person would probably have simply picked up a DVD player. But a simple DVD player wasn't good enough for me. I had become spoiled by the extra options for movie watching my computer gave me, such as ignoring regional encoding, skipping ads, viewing VCDS, DivX, Xvid, or OGM. Plus, the more I thought about it, the more uses I devised for a computer designed for the living room and hooked up to the TV. I could stream MP3s to the living room and play them through the TV now, or through a stereo in the future. I could run MAME, SNES9x, and other emulators on it. Heck, I could even use it to check the weather or browse RSS news feeds. If I ever get an interest in a TV show, I could even use it as my own Tivo, without the monthly subscription fee. I began to plan a new computer.
The Hardware
The most important item to consider for this type of box is the case and motherboard. I wanted to get something small and quiet, since one usually doesn't want to hear a computer fan going all day in the living room. I also wanted something that supported Athlon XP, since I use this processor in all my other machines and find it to usually be much cheaper than equivalent Intel chips. I wanted as much onboard hardware as possible. After shopping around for a while, I eventually decided on a Shuttle SK41G. The onboard video card was powerful enough for my purpose, and all the components were reported to work fine in linux, according to some web searching. The box has a plethora of ports, including firewire (something my desktop system doesn't even have), S-Video, and optical audio. I don't at all regret my decision. This box is extremely easy to work with. It is made of light aluminum and has thumb screws at all the access points. The heat sink with attached heat pipes was no problem to install. The special short IDE cables were a nice touch, although the HD cable was only a 40 pin cable, instead of an 80 pin cable required for ATA133 speed. The case has special latches on the sides to keep the cables out of the way of the air flow. Perhaps it's only because I've been buying cheap cases for my desktops, but I was very impressed with the quality of this case.
After this the other hardware choices were trivial. I bought only a 40GB Maxtor hard drive, since I intend to view most the files on this machine either from DVDs or over the network, and my file server has a very large disk. I ordered an Athlon XP 1900+ because it was the slowest available at newegg.com, the right price, and quite enough for my purpose. I already had a Creative DVD-ROM drive from Christmas several years back in my desktop computer, so I picked up a DVD writer as a replacement for that so I could move the DVD-ROM into this new box. Finally, I estimated that 512 MB of RAM would be adequate for the simple tasks of encoding and decoding, and picked up a single 512MB stick. All the other hardware one would usually need (Ethernet, video, sound, etc) are built into the motherboard. Eventually, I might want to add a video card with a TV decoding function. Also, I'd like to eventually get a remote control and some USB gamepads for the emulators.
Hardware costs (prices from newegg.com):
Case and motherboard: $175
Hard drive: $59
Processor: $57
RAM: $60
DVD Burner: $101
Total: $452, plus tax.
Thanks to my wife, parents, and mother-in-law who all contributed to make this my Christmas present.
Tomorrow I'll post about the software side of things and the struggle to get all this hardware to work together in peace.