Hi All,

I was wondering what is the smallest front end that anyone has built?

My specs are
- solid state - i.e. flash drive only
- 5.1 output
- able to play MPEG well (that is, probably has accelerated video output)
- at least svideo, if not component.

DVD is optional.

There are a number of mini PC platforms out there. My company works with a couple that we put linux on, but I have found their video performance to be very poor and not capable of playing MPEG at DVD sizes.

Note that I already run a VIA MII12000 as my combined FE/BE and I know that can be booted from flash. But I'm looking for something smaller, cheaper and quieter (i.e. solid state, fanless)

Thanks for any thoughts or advice you can give.
Paul.

You may want to take alook at a haupauge MVP. They are small cheap and have very good video image. You run a custom distro on them that has mythtv connectivity abilitys.

here is a link to the distro.

http://www.mvpmc.org/

Now that is seriously cool!
I'm going to do some more research on that little beastie.

Combining it with this: http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/trends/ta10.html
I think its possible to create a pretty cool front end.

Thanks.
Paul

How about a Buffalo Link Theater?

http://reviews.cnet.com/Buffalo_LinkTheater_PC_P3LWG_DVD/4505-6739_7-31290624.html