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My MythTV is diskless and fanless.

I used a VIA EPIA M10000G motherboard with a fanless case.

See here: MiniMyth

Runs great!

I guess what I'm asking is, what combination of software did you end up using for your Media Center PC?

The rest are just Windows Ultra Super Cool Edition with various things removed

I'm pretty sure that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are innately different OS distributions, and that having them on different CDs is actually beneficial to the end user.

Linux itself (the kernel) usually does not differ between kernels in ways a user would notice.

Well, unless it's compiled for a different architecture. But generally the kernel isn't what differs between distributions - usually different distributions are created for different use cases - just like the editions of Windows.

Unless you really think that Mobilinux, MiniMyth, and Ubuntu all need to be installable off the same CD.

I personally prefer to split up the backend and frontend system. Dual PVR250 tuners, a 3Ware 8500-4LP with a RAID-5 array of 4x200GB drives. The frontend uses a diskless Via EPIA M10000 motherboard in a book-sized case running the MiniMyth distribution that boots from a PXE server running on the backend. That way I have a nice small quiet system hooked up in the living room and the backend machine can be in a nice big bulky loud case with lots of drives, fans, and a big power supply. 100Mbit ethernet is more than sufficient for feeding up a very good 720x480 MPEG-2 stream.

Why so long? You want to know a little secret from one satisfied MythTV user to a potential user? Seperate your backend system from the front end you're going to hook up to your TV. It'll add more to the cost but you will appreciate it in the long run. I use a plain old AMD Athlon 1.4 GHZ system with 512MB of RAM and two Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 cards on the backend and a little diskless book-sized system on the frontend using a Via EPIA M10000 motherboard and MiniMyth.

The advantage to going this way is that the backend can be very low-end (a PIII-500MHz or slower would be sufficient) since the MPEG2 encoding is done on the Hauppauge cards. The frontends are also pretty low end (mine is around 1GHz) but they have built in MPEG2 decoder hardware on the motherboard so they use very little CPU while playing back video.

If you run Debian unstable you can get pre-built packages from Matt Zimmerman's web site, so the hard part is getting the IVTV drivers working so you can capture video from the PVR 250 cards. It's well documented and they've stabilized a lot in the last 2 years. My setup has been running without any problems since March when I finally traced back some issue I was having with 0-byte size recordings to an IRQ sharing conflict. Once I disabled the USB and parallel ports I wasn't using and put each tuner on a separate IRQ in the BIOS it's been rock solid. Once you get the capture cards working, mythtv itself is simple to setup. apt-get install the packages, follow the setup prompts, and then run the mythtv setup program to configure your tuners, setup your guide data download preferences (North America uses the free Zap2It Labs Data Direct service that downloads listings in a nice XML format (labs.zap2it.com).

I've been using MythTV for two and a half years now and I honestly never get jealous of TiVo or ReplayTV users. If anything I pity them for being locked into a proprietary pay service with their video locked on a hard drive which forces you to jump through hoops to get at it.

VIA EPIA SP13000 Mini-ITX Motherboard.

"To Summarise: The EPIA-SP 13000 is an important update to the VIA EPIA range improving the 3D graphics performance of the system. ... this is the best VIA EPIA system yet - highly capable as an office machine, or entertainment platform, even capable of the odd game or two. The compact size means it's suitable for a variety of systems, a compact cube case, or a custom solution. The extremely reliable system allows you to use the board as a permenantly switched on server / router / firewall / etc. The number of ports and expansion possibilities lets you customise the storage solution whether you want SATA RAID, or numerous IDE hard drives."

And here's how someone built a MythTV on one.

But if you're going to setup a MythTV on one, I would use the minimyth custom MythTV front end.

I've got an M10K that I use as a diskless minimyth system. It uses a customized kernel that supports the M10K to a T, including non-MPEG playback. I'm very satisfied with this completely silent solution.

I am currently running a FANLESS, DISKLESS M10000 which boots over the network and loads MythTV 0.17.

It works flawlessly.

As you say, the VIA boards perform decoding but not encoding. That's why I have a PVR-250 running on my MythTV server. All the encoding I need to do is performed server side by my capture card. I don't /need/ to perform any ENcoding on my MythTV front end.

For more info about this, check the forums on:

http://www.linpvr.org

One word: MiniMyth

Chop

LinPVR should have the info you are looking for...

Chop