It's an great system, but has a couple of issues. One is power -- that desktop PC sucks a lot of power 24/7 to record our shows. The other is maintenance -- the CPU cooler clogs up with dust and about once a month the overheat alarm beeps and I have to pull the cover and blow out the heat sink with canned air. Annoying.
The solution is a Plug Computer. You know those annoying wall warts or power bricks that every electronic device seems to come with these days? Well, they made one with a computer built right into it. Called a SheevaPlug, it draws about 10 watts (I estimate it to be about 1/10th the power draw of the old desktop server) and has no heatsinks, fans, or other moving parts. Best of all, it was only $100 which is less than you'd spend on a traditional desktop or server.
Here it is installed on my computer desk. The green-arrowed item is the digital tuner, which captures the signals from our antenna and sends the data over the network to the red-arrowed plug computer. This computer saves the data to the purple-arrowed low-power, low-noise, laptop hard drive. When we want to watch TV, we will use our existing set-top box (arrowed red below) to stream the data back off the hard drive via the plug computer, over the network, and display it on our TV:
I only just received the SheevaPlug the other day, so this will be an ongoing project. I installed Linux already, which went remarkably easily, but MythTV has always been a bit of a bear to get installed so it will be some time before it's ready for prime time (pun intentional).
Oh, and in unrelated news, all my gravevines were apparently DOA. Dunno if Home Depot left them outside and they froze, or I did something stupid, but none of them show the least sign of life, even the cutting I brought in and stuck in some water. So... next year. :(
