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With the build of my new MythTV computer that's finally using 1080P video I've been plagued by noise in the video signal.  The solution seemed pretty obvious though unappealing.  You see, I've always had my MythTV PC in the closet and used long VGA and audio runs to bring the signals to the TV & receiver.  As a result I never spent much time worrying about how much noise the machine made.  Eliminating the long VGA run should eliminate the video signal noise but introduce "real" noise into the room.

I chopped up and old PC case with my Dremel and gutted an old subwoofer.  Here's the result.  It's a fairly quiet case with only the noise of the video card fan escaping the box.

Not much left of it

I went through a pile of Dremel cutting blades removing so much of the old case but I'm pleased with how it turned out.  It doesn't have too much strength to it without the hardware attached, but adding the motherboard, Evga 7600GT video card and Hauppage PVR 500, the whole thing feels fairly solid.

Hard drive suspended with bungee cord

The hard drive is held in place nicely by the bungee cord.  Actually it's held better than I expected.  As it's not touching anything solid, it makes very little noise and is barely audfible from right outside the box.

Wiring the new case

I wired in all the usual suspects that any normal case has, reusing the subwoofer's volume knob as the power button and drilled an extra hole so that I can see power and HDD access from the front panel.  A PC speaker was glued in place below the grille and a reset switch was wired into the back of the case.

Test fit with old parts

I used a dead motherboard, power supply and a couple junk soundcards to test everything for proper fit.  I didn't want to risk damaging my new hardware!

Test fit with old parts - Note the reset switch on the lower right.

Yup, it fits!  There's a few extra holes in the backplane as this case was chopped up by it's previous owner but I don't mind.  If I need to, I'll close up some of them with that aluminum tape normally reserved for ductwork.  So far it's fine with me.

The real MythTV parts

This is the actual hardware destined to be in the box.  It's the same size as my test fit hardware so there were no surprises.   My only complaint was all the extra wires hanging out of the Corsair 450W power supply.  Cripes, they're everywhere!

All closed up and in place - Note the IR(remote) receiver near the front leg

I pulled an ethernet cable to the shelf where the box would be and drilled a hole to run power to the PC, video and audio up to the receiver.

Playing noise-free video. Quietly.

 The final product in action.  So far, so good.  You can hear the video card fan but that's about it.  I'm tempted to disconnect the video card's fan and see how it goes but may wait until I have a large slow moving fan to supplement the airflow.  We'll see.

To get the Saphire remote working, all I needed wass to create a ".xmodmaprc" fine in my home folder that looks like this:

! Sapphire remote

keycode  134 = M
keycode  152 = less
keycode  180 = greater
keycode  152 = less
keycode  177 = R
keycode  179 = P
keycode  234 = Escape
keycode  223 = bar

After running my MythTV out of diskspace, my MySql database wouldn't start.  I ran the MythTV setup twice, and it wiped out the MySql connection info.  I didn't remember what I had previously set the password to so I logged into phpmyadmin and changed it.  After making some free disk space, the database fired right up and I was back to watching MthTV.  What I didn't realize was that the password lives in a  few places, not just the  front-end config.  A day or two later I tried to hit Mythweb and found it was unable to connect to the database.  It was showing the followig message:

 It took some digging but I found four (!) places where the password was stored (aside from the front-end setup thing).

1. /etc/mythtv/mythweb-htaccess
2. /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt
   
3. /etc/apache2/sites-available/mythweb.conf
   
4. /usr/share/mythtv/mythweb/mythweb.conf.apache
   

Even after changing all four of these to the new password, I*still* couldn't run Mythweb.  I've since changed back to my old password and everything works again.  I'm just annoyed that it was so difficult.

If anyone knows where else the password gets stored please let me know as this was very difficult to find - I never did find it!  I would certainly appreciate it!

I've recently upgraded my EeePC 701 to a 904HA and thought I'd try out the eeeBuntu base installation.  It installed smoothly and after a few hours of tweaking and adding my programs the clouds parted and the sun came out.  Everything was as it should be.  The Firefox style was a little different than I have on Windows XP and instead of using Littlefox, which I used on my 701 (but always hated), I thought I'd just tweak the default style instead.