Building your box

The short version of what hardware to use is just get the best value, half-decent slightly speedy computer made of BeOS-supported components with plenty of disk space. TV out is a bonus, as is infra-red (either on your motherboard or through something like IRMan). You will also need a TV tuner card (the cheap Hauppage PCI cards are fine), at least for the standard, noddy recording module. In future it would be nice if people found ways to coax the raw MPEG stream from digital broadcasters (which is plausible for some digital video receiver PCI cards at present). videdot is built to allow exactly that kind of thing, it would just need a little add-on that responded to the appropriate messages (see message formats).

Discussions in the past on the mp3box mailing list have been useful. They're solving a slightly different problem - building a home audio PC running BeOS underneath - but it bumps into many of the same problems. You still want a small, quiet, networked machine with most likely an LCD display and infra-red control. The differences are in needing TV out (find it on BeBits) and more processing oomph. We generally need faster processors than the audio folk, but we can do it on a weedy processor if we were to use hardware for encoding/decoding. In the first instance we'll stick to doing it in software, and write new plugins as desired.

In particular, supporting things like encoding CDs and DVDs to store them locally (which makes the discs handy backups, but you need not fiddle with them) will only follow through plugins. Since plugins can expose interface in the main view, this doesn't mean they need feel less integrated though.

Slashdot recently pointed to an article about building a 'Home Theatre PC', which covers various parts and cases that fit well in a separates system - with some attention to quality and fidelity. (Note this isn't written from a BeOS-centric perspective, so some cross-referencing for hardware support is in order if you want to use your setup to run videdot. In particular, ATI Radeon support is currently up in the air, but folk are working on it.)

This story on The Register has some links to some useful suppliers of quiet kit.

More info to follow on:

Motherboards

Particularly well-supported boards with lots of useful kit on-board. Can keep everything smaller, quieter and simpler.

Video capture

Several ways we will source the video, from beautiful, clean all-digital setups - DVB cards, liberated digital set-top boxes and digital in from home-brew content - to noddy analogue capture cards.

TV out

See BeBits. Looking into supporting the Voodoo3 3000 (since I happen to have one, and a bunch of docs about it).

Remote control

Initially infra-red and a Web server (for very remote control). Given bluetooth support for BeOS we can let people use their modern mobiles, Palms and (modulo Microsoft's dodgy Bluetooth implementation) PocketPCs.

Infra-red

Slaving boxes that know nothing about any of this through their remote control port

Both directions, slavishly controlling dumb set-top boxes by pretending to be their remote control & accepting IR input from remotes.

Serial

You can talk to some set-top boxes over a serial line. Notably there are some pace boxes that accept the same signals you could proffer over the IR interface, but it's simpler and more reliable. See this MythTV thread about working around a different, but overlapping, problem

Removable media

CD-R is an obvious choice. Support for any of the DVD recordables ought to follow

DVD support

Will playout through any DVD drive, using the VideoLan client

Hush-hush

Keeping it quiet - information on noise reduction kit to follow.

Plus (to follow):

• Where to download the software
• How to install
• Initial setup

See also: the wishlist of things we'd like to able to support / suggest here.