[PLUG] Mythtv

["David Colon" <dcolon@dcolon.org>]

I asked for feedback on Mythtv during last night's meeting but no one
present had any experience.  I was encouraged to post to the list.

That brings me here.  I've been following Mythtv for a while now but
never bought all of the pieces to the puzzle to build my own system.
I'm finally ready to begin.  I'd like to start off with one high
definition front end and a back end with a large amount of disk space.

My goal is to build/buy a silent or nearly silent front end.  The back
end can be noisy as it will sit in a separate room.  I read about a
company called TVease that is making fully configured Mythtv systems.
They have a $500 system called the Hannibal that can be used as a high
definition front end.  It comes with a 3 GHz Celeron proc, 512 megs
ram, Nvidia Geforce 6200 256 MB 8X AGP video accelerator [fanless],
dvd burner, 80 gig disk, remote with IR receiver, and a lot more.  For
video it can accommodate vga, dvi, and component video.  The URL for
the system is:

http://store02.prostores.com/servlet/tvease/Detail?no=5

Has anyone bought one of these or heard anything about the company?
It looks like a really nice system for what it provides.  To reduce
noise, my thought is to rip out the hard drive and net boot it and
access all of my content from the back end.  Are there any
recommendations for other vendors that sell nice prebuilt Mythtv
systems that can do high def?

For the back end, I'm thinking of building a lower end system that can
do SATA RAID.  I'd load it up with a bunch of 500 gig SATA drives and
setup a RAID 5 array to give me some redundancy in the event of a disk
failure.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or recommendations for setting
up a high def front end?  It should have a high "WAF" factor.

Thanks in advance to everyone for any advice or help that is offered.

David
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