The hard part in building your own completely silent PVR / home theater PC system is choosing the correct components.
You need the following
- a quite PC
- a tv receiver
- a remote
- software
For software, you have lots of choices like mythtv, windows media center etc.
After trying a few, we found ourselves using microsoft media center. It's super easy to setup and use, virtually configures itself with the hardware you have (remote, tv receiver), and gives you program schedules (what's on tv) for your zip.
I did like the XBMC UI, but it requires a myth backend and gets complicated.
For a quite PC, you can't beat the Shuttle XS35GT. If you install an SSD hard drive, it's completely silent. It has no fan. It's super powerful too with dual core hyper-threaded (4 cpus in task manager). Cost ~240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856101114
It comes with a handy CD that has all the windows 7 drivers which makes windows 7 installation a breeze. e.g. network drivers etc.
Matching memory can go up to 2GB.
Cost ~32
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220281
SSD silent hard drive - Grab the biggest you can. win7 takes about 12 gb. Media center will want about 10GB for cache (allowing pause etc), and you need 15GB per hour of digital tv. I got a 120GB for $169. , otherwise i'd probably buy one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-148-348&nm_mc=EMCPB-012011&cm_mmc=EMCPB-012011-_-PB010811-_-Item-_-20-148-348 which has sweet specs)
For a remote, i like the VRC-1100 MCE remote. It includes controls to move the mouse as well which is handy.
The tv receiver is a cheap kworld ub435-q usb thingo. cost = ~30
It has win7 driver.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815260023&cm_re=ub435-q-_-15-260-023-_-Product
Works great.
** note about network storage --- windows media center simply does not support or allow recording directly to network locations. However, it's not a big deal because you can create a windows task scheduler task to move recorded programs to a network drive immediately after the recording completes. You do this by starting task scheduler (type task scheduler in the start button find box), and select action > create basic task. Give it a name (e.g. copy recorded tv programs to network location) and hit next. Select the task to start when a specific windows event occurs, and in the drop for event, select media center and the source being recording and the event id is 1 (for when a recording finishes normally). Then create a batch file in notepad (i.e. a file with name tv_copy.bat where you save it using "All Files" so that it really ends in .bat and not .txt) and it contains one line like
start /MIN move /Y "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\*.*" L:\
where L:\ is the destination (mapped network drive)
This will move recorded programs that end normally. To move recorded programs that are stopped manually, create another task that uses event id 3.
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