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Pooh

Pooh is my media server. It's something I scavenged from the office on its way to the dumpster.Pooh

Hardware

The motherboard is an Intel 80845GL-based unit with onboard video, ethernet, and sound. The CPU is a Celeron clocking in at 1.7GHz. The machine has 512MB of RAM.

Storage is provided by a 20GB Quantum Fireball, which holds the OS and SQL database, and a Maxtor 250GB that holds the multimedia content (audio, video, etc.)

Network connectivity is achieved through a D-Link 802.11g wireless card. Since I don't feel like tearing up my finished basement to run ethernet cable, this was a simple way to get the machine connected to the internet for MythWeb. As it turns out, MythTV's frontend-backend communication is light enough that it can run over this link without too much trouble.

Since the machine's primary output device is a CRT television (I have not yet upgraded to a fancy LCD with an RGB input,) I have an NVidia card installed with S-Video output. This allows me to send a fairly decent signal to the TV. An LCD big-screen is on my short-list, though, since they've come so far down in price.

I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card installed, and connected to my analog cable TV service. This card has a cable tuner and hardware MPEG-2 encoder built in, so the computer can record television shows and stream them directly to disk, with very little CPU load.

Operating system

This machine runs Debian Etch, with many packages upgraded to Unstable. This is mainly due to the alpha-status of MythTV and the drivers for the tuner/encoder card.

Roles

DVR

MythTV turns this machine into a very competent digital recorder. With a subscription to schedules direct, I can simply find a show by name and ask Pooh to record it, and it gets recorded. With additional plugins to MythTV I can play any type of media file, access and schedule recordings over the web, and transcode recordings to other formats for export to other devices.

Jukebox

Since Pooh has so much storage space and is connected to my 5.1 receiver, I also use it to house and play all my digital music.