Sigger’s New Myth System

Purpose: To act as a front-end in a family room, primarily for MythVideo to play content (DVD’s as iso’s and avi’s) stored elsewhere on wired 100 Mbps LAN.

Important Factors:
Form factor: Small (e.g. mini-ITX, mini-cube or HTPC sizing)
Noise factor: Extremely important that is be low; preferably passively cooled.
CPU: 
Capable of xine/mplayer playing HDTV quality with headroom for post-processing plug-ins like sharpening, etc
No preference AMD vs Intel
Video card: 
HDTV widescreen compatible resolution (WXGA) (Pioneer PDP-614MX native is 1365 x 768)
Mpeg-2 hardware acceleration
Mpeg -4 acceleration? (available? Adequately supported? Make sense?)
DVI/HDMI output connector.  
Local storage: modest since content stored on LAN.
Audio Out: SPDIF or other multi-channel (5.1)
Memory – 512 MB.  Arbitrary amount!
DVD burner, CD R/W
IR: would love to have receiver mountable inside the case.  Otherwise, already have a Packard Bell IR receiver.  Existing IR repeater brings signal from outside wall unit in to A/V component area.
Keyboard or mouse: none.
Tuner cards: none.  (it will sit adjacent to our digital cable DVR)

Amount of assembly required by Sigger: Must be minimal.  No piecemealing.

Distro: Knoppmyth

Output device: Will be connected to 61” plasma (presumably via DVI/HDMI connector)