Update: Huzzah! MY AC power brick arrived today and after replacing the 5.5ODx2.1ID barrel plug with a 5.5ODx2.5ID plug I plugged it into the tiny 200w DC-DC power supply. The machine now successfully boots with NO FANS. Edit: I have also just ordered the equipment I need to extend my wired home network from the top floor down to the basement so I will be undertaking that soon in order to get the best possible performance out of this machine where it's intended to be used. Which is right next to the really big TV in the basement.
Once I figure out where my bank account stands I'll probably be ordering the flash drive so I can move from a 9dBa machine to a 0dBa one. Meanwhile I will try to start work on the case construction, and hence the taking of many many pictures will hopefully commence soon.
lol Captain Slug you are doing exactly what I'd be doing if I had money good luck with all your inotive projects, I make lots of projects on pro desktop which I got free from school but the matirials alone for a custom case are above what I pay for my normal case. The plan is to aford a dremal and mod my current case to death eep sorry for the odd thread hijack im in an odd mood.
I'll be able to get back to this project soon. Yesterday I managed to network the upstairs of my house to the downstairs by snaking cable through the central air-conditioning return duct. Now that that's finished I can start on machining the plastic.
Nice one. I'd love to have a silent PC, yet I'd hate it at the same time. I wouldn't get annoyed by the constand loud whirring of fans, but I'd never be able to tell if it was on or off. Anyway, I like the styling. Maybe it's just me, but it looks a bit like a cross between an Xbox360 and a dell. Sorry if you have already answered this question, but what materials are you using? Also, what do you expect will be the total cost of this project? Looking forward to the pics! _C
Update: Wireless networking sucks for streaming video so I've slowly been working on wiring the whole house with cat5e. I already linked the upstairs with the downstairs by snaking cable through the return duct of the central air conditioning in my house so the upstairs and basement are linked. I have one final length to run between this machine and Remora. That will happen sometime soon and will make playback much smoother. The total cost of the project is around $250 and the case will be made primarily from acrylic.
Man I loooove this idea. That mobo looks familiar, but it wasn't what I was thinking it was. the case remindes me of a dell SX270 or SX260... but it isn't loud, or a prescott powered toaster!
I actually managed to accomplish something today. Huzzah! My house is now officially modded. A month or two ago I started work on wiring my house with cat5e, but today I managed to run the last length of cable. Here's the switch located in the basement next to the big screen TV, which is what Ruhe NMP is designed to work with. The switch then connects to the RJ45 keystone jacks mounted on the wall. The white jack is the uplink connection (see next 2 photos) and the black is the extension that connects my Remora machine (located in the family room one floor up) to the switch. Conveniently the other side of the wall is the furnace room. Again, the black cable will be travelling to the family room which is one floor up. And the white cable will be travelling up two floors and connecting to the router in the office. The white cable travels upstairs through the return vent of the central Air-Conditioning/Furnace system. This was quite easy to accomplish since the return vent upstairs is adjacent to one wall in the office. I used a really long drill bit extensions and a holes saw to drill through the office wall and into the vent. Then I simply fed the cable down the duct, cut a matching hole large enough for me to reach in and pull the cable out. The black cable travels around the wall, over the furnace, through the basement ceiling, to the exterior wall under the bay window, up to the deck, and through the wall, to the wallplate in the family room. All 5 computer in the house are now networked and every computer now has the ability to remotely schedule recordings from a web client TV guide interface. Each computer on the network also has the ability to stream video over the network from any other machine sharing some. Primarily, Remora (in the family room) is hosting videos it recorded. And secondarily my main computer (on the second floor) is hosting video downloaded from the internet or converted from VHS. One notable exception is that since Ruhe NMP is using the same software as Remora to playback video, it can also remotely recognize the comskip files that Remora generates. So anything that remora has recorded can be played back in the basement without commercials.
Nice job on the networking. Mine is much more basic than yours, a cable going from each room up the wall and through the ceiling into the loft, then down into my room where the router lives. No wall plates or anything. Would have liked to do the wallplates thing, but I didn't know anywhere to get them at the time and I'm not sure how easy it is to get into our walls.... I'm subscribed to this. EDIT: Are you using any additional software to GB-PVR?
Interior walls are fairly easy to work with, provided you can find the caps to them (or can measure accurately enough to find them) from the loft. Remora (the computer in the family room) is running GB-PVR w/ dtvcontrol running minimized as an external channel changing program. The comskip plugin is installed and setup. PCremotecontrol is running in the system tray to interface with the remote control I chose. I need to find a reliable automatic clock updater and I still have to setup an automated transcoding plugin. I haven't had time to do either yet. Ruhe NMP is running a very basic install of GB-PVR with no tuner settings or guide information added. It's only meant for playback so the extra features were simply removed from the menu system. Girder is running in the system tray to interface with the remote control I chose. And the rest of the computer on the network seem to get the best playback performance using PowerDVD. DVD software seems to do a much better job of playing back streaming video from a buffer than anything else I've tried. If anyone knows of any standalone software or winamp plugins that recognize comskip files please let me know.
Ah, so is the web interface a part of GB-PVR? I would like to have a similar system to yours, except I would be using a wireless video sender on the PC with the tuners. Does the PC turn itself on to record or is it on all the time?
that pc looks noice love the house wireing too, our house has a switch/router/modem/ downstairs, and my pc & laptop & brothers pc are wirelss, the dowstairs ones are the only cabled ones.
ok you prob gonna want more hdd space than 12gb how about this for an idea, if you have a comp at home ie a server thats on all time you coulds install a 120gb or wat ever you want hd and share it, and create a network drive on ur 0db comp
Yes, it has a simple web server feature that you can access remotely. You can even do it from outside of your home network if you have your router setup correctly and a static IP adress (or a dynamic IP domain forwarding service). The computer on the main floor that acts as a dedicated recording and file serving machine: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=88767 It has a 250gb hard drive. The main rig in my room also acts as a file server for any video I've downloaded or encoded from other sources. Ruhe NMP is going to act as nothing more than a standalone client machine on the network. Granted a cheaper option would have been a Media-MVP or another type of thin client, but I wanted a little more functionality than such a device can offer.
Looks good fromt eh initial designs. few ideas too throw in the pot, if you are making a NMP machine why not scrap the HDD and the DVD drive and wack in a WIFI card and have it rip everything off a local server this will then actually be a NMP machine as you'll be running everything off solid state also will run faster and generate less heat then a HDD, too have the HDD stop spinning wouldn't you have too have the core OS files ran off the Ram only having one slot is going too limit you too a single 1GB stick plus you'll need the other operations too be burned off of it. Just a thought Nice Matx board, should bring for a nice HTPC Morgan.
a) This machine is already wired to a LAN. b) This machine is replacing an older DVD player which wasn't playing some newer discs properly. So it has to have a DVD drive c) The hard drive doesn't produce any heat, especially since it's only spun during the boot sequence. And all of the running windows programs are lumped into the Swap file which I've setup to run off of the RAMdisk d) The motherboard is limited to a maximum of 512mb of RAM
