The Hardware

Continuing from my previous post, here's what I had left over for my new HTPC after I rebuilt my desktop PC.   I bought this stuff in a pinch at Fry's a few years ago because the northbridge of my previous desktop PC got fried (no pun intended) when the little fan stopped working and melted.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz
• MSI G41TM-E43
• CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) Model TWIN2X4096-6400C5
• Galaxy GeForce 9600GT OC 512M. It has an HDMI output, which would be nice to get working since it would mean one less cable I would have to deal with. I like to play an occasional game here and there and I think it would be pretty sweet to play Trackmania on a big screen TV. Hopefully I can get that game to work on Wine, but I'll save that for a future post.

Stuff that I purchased

• Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Media Center Kit. In retrospect, I wish that I had done some more research on this card since the Linux drivers don't support all the features of the card. The specs look great, but if they don't work in Linux then it's pretty much useless for this project. I know for sure that the IR port doesn't work, forcing me to have to buy a separate USB remote. I guess in some respect, it's good not to have the remote tied to the capture card. Support for the analog tuners was recently built into the Linux driver and they show up in dmesg, however, I haven't spent any time getting them to work yet. 
• Vista MCE Remote Control. I spent a lot of time getting the remote to work when I built my first HTPC since it was tied to one of the Hauppauge analog cards. This time around, I wanted to get something that was more generic and that didn't depend on another piece of hardware. That way I can swap things in and out without worrying about dependencies. 
• Antec EarthWatts 650W Power Supply. Didn't do too much research here, I just went to Fry's and got something quiet, power efficient, and not too expensive.
• Seagate Barracuda® 3.5-inch SATA 1-TB Hard Drive. This will hold the OS and MythTV recordings. I have another drive in my existing HTPC which I will eventually plug into the new HTPC, which will hold backups from my desktop PC.
• Internal S/PDIF Digital Audio Cable. Need this to hook up the GeForce 9600GT graphics card to the motherboard so that the HDMI port on the card will output sound. Hopefully it works as expected. 

Stuff that I plan on purchasing

• SilverStone GD02S. My current HTPC case is kind of an eye sore, not sure what I was thinking back when I bought it. The GD02S is on my Christmas wish list, so I've held off buying one for the time being. In the meantime, I've put all the parts in a case I had laying around the house so that I can start installing stuff. 

Next up, installing CentOS 6...

Hello World!

My first post, YEY!

I'm an Oracle Database Administrator that likes to tinker with home theater PC's (HTPC's) when I have some spare time. I know Linux pretty well when it comes to running Oracle databases but I've come to learn that Linux for an HTPC is a totally different beast. I created this blog so that I may share my experiences of building out a Linux HTPC with the rest of the world. My hope is that someone out there would find it useful and perhaps help them save some time and avoid some of the frustrations that I've gone through over the years with my HTPC. I may on occasion do a random Oracle related post, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum.

I built out my first and current HTPC system back in early 2006. It's running on a machine that I put together for the sole purpose of running MythTV. It has an Athlon 3200+ CPU, 1G of memory, an nVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card, a couple of Hauppauge analog capture cards, and a pcHDTV HD-5500 digital capture card. I don't use the analog capture cards anymore since everything is pretty much broadcast digitally nowadays, however, I do still use one of them for the remote control because it has an IR input. I use that machine for other things such as a backup server, a DNS server, and a DHCP server. Over time I've added other HTPC applications to it like Boxee, Subsonic, and Serviio, which I use to watch more demanding HD content like H.264 on my Playsation 3.

Surprisingly, the HTPC I built back in 2006 has held up pretty well over the years. It is able to play back HD MPEG recordings just fine due to the hardware acceleration of the nVidia card and I haven't really had any major issues other than a failed hard drive due to a power outage. Because it was able to play back recordings in HD, I haven't had a compelling reason to do a major overhaul of the hardware, so I just left it alone. I will admit though that the hardware has been showing its age for quite a while and it doesn't do too well with Flash (Boxee) or H.264 video (that's why I setup Serviio). The opportunity to do a hardware overhaul  presented itself when I upgraded my desktop PC, which left behind some fairly decent spare parts, so I figured now is a good time, plus it's the holidays and I have a bit more spare time than usual.

The Linux flavor that I chose for my first HTPC was Gentoo. I chose Gentoo because I found a good article on the Internet that detailed how to setup MythTV on it. I also thought that Gentoo would be a good challenge (which it was) that would allow me to learn up a thing or two about how Linux works (which it did).

At first I thought that Gentoo was really cool, and to some extent I still do, however, over the years, I just got tired of keeping up with the frequent updates, not to mention all the little details you have to pay attention to. Compiling most everything was time consuming (MythTV took about an hour), and sometimes I would have to do it twice because I was missing a use flag that was needed for a feature to work. The thing that really wore me down was the feeling that the next update, no matter how benign, had the potential to break something which would cause my delicate MythTV environment to crumble, forcing me to have to spend a lot of time researching and fixing stuff. I guess that just goes with the territory of  being on the bleeding edge of Linux updates. Eventually I got to the point where I just didn't have the interest or motivation to go through updates anymore so I stopped, which isn't good from a security perspective. After about a year, my Gentoo system was so out of date that I would probably have to rebuild it from scratch to make it current.

This time around I wanted to use a binary distribution where I didn't have to spend a lot of time compiling stuff and one that had a longer support lifetime so that I wouldn't be forced to update as frequently. Being an Oracle DBA, I feel most at home with the Red Hat distribution of Linux. I ultimately decided to go with  the latest version of CentOS, which is essentially a Red Hat clone without the Red Had branding and artwork. I considered using Scientific Linux but decided on CentOS because I was more familiar with it. With the packages from the good folks at EPEL and ATrmps the process of building up the HTPC was no where near as time consuming as doing it on Gentoo (at least not so far). I guess only time will tell.

Next up, the new(er) hardware...