A small follow-up on my previous post about my mediacenter project to get an overview for myself and anybody interested.

OK, so now I [almost] have a quiet Shuttle mediacenter with 3GHz Pentium4, 1GiB PC3200 DDR RAM memory, a Maxtor 250GiB harddisk drive with 16MiB cache, a NEC 3540A DVD +/- rewriter and a cool Hauppauge PVR350 TV card with MPEG2 encoder/decoder chip and remote control. After all this technobabble, what the hell am I going to spend all this power on?

First, it's going to act as a VCR on steroids of course. Check the MythTV site, and especially the screenies/features page for more on that. Featuring an electronic programming guide [hopefully for the Netherlands too], video editing [removing commercials ;)] and lots more. It can show DVDs, movies and music on the hdd, looking up meta information about it, rip those movies and music _to_ hdd [for the lazy people among us], it shows news headlines [including RSS feeds, yay!], your local weather, pictures in a slideshow, and -- last but not least -- you can play games on it, as it has an emulator frontend [MAME, NES, SNES and generic PC games]!

Yeah, and those are only the features of MythTV. Of course I will try to make Firefox and Thunderbird work at the low TV resolution for some quick checking. Furthermore, it's going to serve as my new server.

That will include the Apache webserver [including mod_python for the Django Python framework I think], a mailserver [can't live without it anymore] and shellserver [ofcourse]. I'll finally have some room and horsepower to build some livecds again too. As my parents are going to change internet provider, and are a bit bored having my current server xcalibur making noice in their computer room, I'm going to move all services from xcalibur to this yet-to-be-named server. Then I can cannibalize xcalibur for upgrades to my current workstation, as an Athlon XP 1800+ is somewhat faster then my current AMD Duron 750MHz ;)