My MythTV Box Blew Up
Mon, Nov 7, 2005 with tags television , mythtv , media center , antec , athlon64 , old and busted , linux , new hottness , ubuntuWhile not entirely true, that’s the gist of what happened. Last Sunday, October 30th, the machine was hanging a lot. After lots of cussing, I decided just to shut the machine off and banish it to the corner for a while. When I got back the machine wouldn’t post and was making a funky smell. I’m still not sure if it’s the motherboard, processor, or power supply. I hope it’s just the power supply.
In any case, it provided a nice excuse to upgrade my computer with new toys. All of the cards and drives inside the computer were fine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reuse much of the other components such as memory, or rather chose not to reuse much of it. Here’s what I got for the new computer:
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice core)
- MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum Motherboard
- XFX GeForce 6600 (256MB ram)
- 1GB Ram
- Antec Overture II Media Center Case
Since then I’ve been fighting to get everything working again. But it looks like it’s all basically going. We were able to watch the high-definition version of Monsters Inc. with little problem. The DVD player and remote work fine. I even have it controlling the cable box so we can record digital cable or high definition right from the cable box. Tonight I’m going to get pcHDTV card working on it, provided that I can actually get XvMC to work properly. I’m working on a thorough writeup on how to get MythTV working in this sorta setup, and I’ll post it soon.
In the mean time, here are some pictures of the system as I built it and put it in the entertainment center. For reference on what the old setup looked like, you may want to see these pictures:
Old MythTV Box
Old Entertainment Center
New MythTV Box
The inside of the case is still remarkably roomy compared to many desktop and media center cases
Messy cables behind the entertainment center
At home in the entertainment center watching Monsters, Inc in high definition
Update 11/08/2005: I started writing this yesterday, but didn’t donwload the photos until this morning. In the mean time I’ve managed to get XvMC working by beating it into submission using a brute force method. This means that HDTV is more or less working, but I can tell that my disk I/O is hurting. It may be time to invest in that large RAID 5 array soon.