A description of how to build a completely silent DVR (digital video recorder) based on embedded Linux and a Via mini-ITX board has been published at MythPVR. The unofficial site's five-page story describes hardware component selection and MiniMyth installation to CompactFlash.

Story author Pete Daly told LinuxDevices, “Took me a while to figure the whole thing out. I had a good (although sometimes frustrating) time putting the whole thing together.”

Daly's silent DVR is based on a passively cooled Via ME6000 board (pictured at right), a low-powered board able to play back standard resolution video smoothly thanks to its hardware MPEG-2 decoder. The board also features S-video TV out, along with an RCA jack configurable in the BIOS as video-out or S/PDIF (digital audio out).

On the software side, Daly installed the MiniMyth DVR distribution for diskless devices onto a 1GB CompactFlash. The MythPVR website also has articles describing how to boot MiniMyth over the network; however, Daly said he prefers CF booting, which results in a boot-to-menu time of 85 seconds, he said.

The interesting and informativfe story includes installation scripts, along with a fairly high-level overview of how to install MiniMyth to CF. It can be found here.

 
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