Christmas is upon us and I have the special privilege of having a birthday in December to go along with the day of festivities near the end of the month. Even now that I approach my tri-decade celebration I find there is still the excitement of getting gifts. As time has gone on, I find that I rely on getting presents from other people less and less and use this time of year to indulge myself with whatever whim strikes me.

Last year I got myself one of my favorite gifts ever, a ReplayTV. Yea I know, everyone thinks Tevo is better, but I have to mostly disagree. The ability to share files between units and finding programs like DVArchive that lets you transfer the files off so you can burn VCD's and DVD's from the videos with out any hardware hacking or having to pay for additional service what so ever just rocks. The network connection also doubled as a conduit to add your own pictures to appear when you pause live TV (tevo Makes you look at adds ). Then finding the other kids at the AVSforum that have an insane passion for how cool the Replay really is just reaffirms my choice. Yeah the whole disintegration of Sonic Blue did have a lot of us worried but the storm has passed and we all survived.

Now I find myself a year later wanting more. Right now, I'm trying to talk myself into building my own PVR. My Ex-Employer (we'll call them “Hell”) was a retailer that sold the HewlettPackard DEC100 MP3 jukebox. This was a cool box that could rip all your CD's to it's internal 40GB hard drive and let you burn mix CD's all from your stereo. A Grand was a bit steep for the price but hey people bought them (and Hacked them as this Yahoo group shows). Now to get back to my point, “Hell” had a “Shell” display ( an external case with no innards) and threw it out. Well the “Shell” was a beautiful aluminum case that had mounting points for 2 hard drives, a CDRom drive, a power source, motherboard, LED display, front panel controls, and front panel USB plug all in a case the size of a VCR. Needless to say, this went to my trunk instead of the dump.

Obviously this wasn't your neighborhood ATX compatible case so I started doing some digging to find out what kind of MB would fit in this thing. I found out that the dimensions were perfect for an old school NDX motherboard. This is an old standard used for desktop computers before all the manufacturers switched to tower designs. The problem is that the fastest processor the NDX boards supported was (I think) 500MHz. Too slow for what I want to do. Then I came across www.Mini-ITX.com. This is a great sight “across the pond” that has been heavily featured all over due to the unique designs that are posted using the newish VIA Mini ITX motherboards. The cool thing about Mini-ITX boards is that they are small enough for the case I have (17cm x 17cm) and have everything on the board including the processor, audio chip and video chip. The plugs can also serve multiple uses, like the audio plugs can be the standard stereo out, line in, and mic in or you can change the inputs to be surround and center/sub out for full surround sound. There's also a SPDIF connector that can become a composite output for a standard TV (There's a S-Video plug too!). Well VIA has come out with a 1GHz Mini ITX board for around $150. Add a Capture card, 120GB Hard drive and DVD burner and you got your self a killer PVR that would let you record your shows, burn them to DVD and play any kind of media you wanted for under $500 if I buy cheep parts. The idea's got merit even if you used off the shelf software that I already have been using with the rips from my Replay.

Recently I found the Linux program Myth TV that is actually a front end to do everything I want this project to do. It's open source, making it easy to acquire and modify if I got into it. I've also found that there is even a knoppix variation created to install and completely run Myth TV from one CD. So needless to say, the tinkerer in me is getting all tingly inside and wants to go for it and the holiday giver in me wants to let me do it. Stay tuned and maybe I'll put up some updates about the project.