Siggers New Myth System
Purpose: To act as a front-end in a family room, primarily for MythVideo to play content (DVDs as isos and avis) stored elsewhere on wired 100 Mbps LAN.
Important Factors:
Form factor: Small (e.g. mini-ITX, mini-cube or HTPC sizing)
Noise factor: Extremely important that is be low; preferably passively cooled.
CPU:
Capable of xine/mplayer playing HDTV quality with headroom for post-processing plug-ins like sharpening, etc
No preference AMD vs Intel
Video card:
HDTV widescreen compatible resolution (WXGA) (Pioneer PDP-614MX native is 1365 x 768)
Mpeg-2 hardware acceleration
Mpeg -4 acceleration? (available? Adequately supported? Make sense?)
DVI/HDMI output connector.
Local storage: modest since content stored on LAN.
Audio Out: SPDIF or other multi-channel (5.1)
Memory 512 MB. Arbitrary amount!
DVD burner, CD R/W
IR: would love to have receiver mountable inside the case. Otherwise, already have a Packard Bell IR receiver. Existing IR repeater brings signal from outside wall unit in to A/V component area.
Keyboard or mouse: none.
Tuner cards: none. (it will sit adjacent to our digital cable DVR)
Amount of assembly required by Sigger: Must be minimal. No piecemealing.
Distro: Knoppmyth
Output device: Will be connected to 61 plasma (presumably via DVI/HDMI connector)