My previous build-your-own-TiVo post discussed a project surrounding non-US satelite receiver cards. So are there similar projects that use a basic TV capture card? Of course: Freevo features an on-screen TV guide (using XMLTV, itself an interesting project), DVD player, MPEG/AVI video player, MP3/Ogg music player, picture viewer, and even ("preliminary") MAME arcade game emulation. The screenshots are very nice looking. Taking the wind out of its sails is the current lack of the essential feature, the R in PVR, the ability to record TV (live or otherwise). DVD menus are also on the "planned feature" list. Oh well.

I've been quite tempted lately to build a media box myself. It's hard not to be tempted with motherboards like these: ethernet, audio and video all on-board, with TV video out, fanless operation, and a mini-ITX form factor of just 170mm x 170mm. "Make me into a set-top PC," screams this little motherboard, "PLEASE!" Add a DVD-ROM drive, an ultra-quiet power supply (I can personally vouch for these), a silent hard drive, and an infrared remote receiver, and you're practically there. For a PVR, you'll need a separate video card to do the heavy lifting (TV in and out). I was merely thinking of MP3s for my box, but it comes so close to doing so much else, it'd be a shame not to go all out ala Freevo.

Having spent too much on holiday gifts this year, I quickly scaled back to trying to make a cosmetically decent media box using as few new parts as possible, repurposing one of my existing boxen for the task. I stayed up for hours drawing diagrams to get my regular ATX motherboard and excessively large SoundBlaster AWE64 card into a reasonably sized layout, possibly for putting it all into a home-built case (because for some reason nobody is making set-top-shaped PC cases yet, dammit). Width and depth were no problem, but with the SoundBlaster sticking perpendicular to the motherboard, it'd have to be at least 5-1/2 inches tall. Given the noise problems with the CPU fan and hard drive (the aforementioned quiet power supply makes no noticable noise), I gave up on the idea. It took me a while to remember that I could just run a cable from the PC in the office to the stereo downstairs, and control it all via a web interface and our Wi-Fi-enabled iBook, no hardware changes necessary. This seems to be what most people do-- most people who are inclined to use a computer for their music at home, anyway.