SuperAlien
This is my bad ass killer SuperAlien. This system is now the master backend for MythTV. I started building this system during Christmas 2003.
Something funny: I ran a dryer vent hose from the back of my computer to under my desk. I did this to help keep my feet warm during the cold days of January
MythTV
MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems. MythTV is known to work on Linux and Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It does not run on Windows.
MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:
- You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television.
- You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time.
- You can have multiple servers, each with multiple capture cards in them. All servers are centrally managed and all programs are scheduled by the Master backend.
- You can have multiple clients (called "frontends" in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control.
- You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems.
- Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from Zap2It.com, a subsidiary of Tribune Media Services. This free service is called DataDirect, and provides MythTV almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don't have enough tuners.
- MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system.
MythTV is an awesome application. It has completely changed the way I watch television. Commercial flagging is about 97% accurate!
Case
This computer is my SuperAlien because it has an alienware SuperAlien case. The case is VERY light and comes with 6 speed controlled fans. It has a 500 watt power supply and 2 LCD temperature monitors. This case is totally tool free. There are 5 slide out hard drive trays, 5 5 1/4 external bays, and 2 3 1/2 external bays. The only thing I dislike about this case is the LCD temperature monitors do not display in Fahrenheit.
Motherboard
I have an ASUS P4P800-Deluxe motherboard. It has onboard raid, serial ata raid, ide, 5.1 sound, gigabit lan (via pci bus), and a couple of other cool things. This motherboard is excellent. I could not be happier with it.
Overclocking
I built this machine to overclock very easy. It has a 2.6C (800mhz FSB) with a Zalman AL-CU cooler on it. I used arctic silver for the thermal compound. While overclocked to 2.9 and with room temps around 74 degrees the cpu will run around 79 degrees. Under heavy load, the CPU never goes over 117 degrees. I have overclocked as high as 3.2 ghz.
Ram
I have 4x256 Geil (pronounced "gale") DDR 500 ram to allow me to overclock. I've been very happy with this ram.
Hard Drives
I've got 3 hard drives on this system with a combined space of 560 gigabytes. 500 gig is dedicated to the MythTV backend and the rest to the operating system.
Video Card
I'm using an Nvidia 6000 series AGP card. I run X on the SVideo tv out to my other computer so I can watch MythTV
Other Peripherals
- 8x Dual Layer DVD Writer
Operating System / Software
I am running Fedora Core 4 on my SuperAlien. It runs pretty good, but Asus motherboards don't work very well with FC4.