9/2007 UPDATE: If you want to build your own Media Center, I find that the easiest, absolutely best resource for finding the lowest component prices is this thread over at the SlickDeals forum.

WINDOWS? I thought I knew you, Litwack!
I’ve been wanting a TiVo for a long time but it galls me to pay $299 for a lifetime of data that maybe not “should be free” but happens to be freely available via other avenues. No, I decided: I’ll build an inexpensive PC out of commodity parts (courtesy crazy internet deals and Fry’s) and run KnoppMyth on it.

What happened?
Linux is hard! I couldn’t get anything to work. I mean, the system installed, but I didn’t know what options to choose, and I had no idea how to get drivers running. I entered ‘TV mode’ in Myth, got a black screen, and couldn’t get back to the menu - no single key on the keyboard worked, no fkey, not escape, nothing. I’m sure some Linux guy in the comments is going to be like ‘oh puny human Linux is easy, all you need to do is grep something something pipe something something chmod mkdir and then have an intrinsic understanding of things that are non-obvious, ha ha ha’ and that’s cool and everything but it’s too hard. For me. If I had someone to hold my hand the whole time and help me through it, that would be one thing. So that’s what happened to the idea of running MythTV.

Luckily someone was holding my hand for the computer-building part
I bought a copy of Building The Perfect PC by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman-Thompson (Bob: why not hyphenate? you’re preventing me from being all “Robert Bruce and Barbara Fritchman-Thompson”), which I bought on a whim from Barnes & Noble because of their generous return policy but also because it’s from O’Reilly and O’Reilly has never failed me. The book is really useful, plainspoken, and I highly recommend it although like all computer books it’s aging fast. I’ve been using computers for DECADES and always wanted to build one, like, in the same way I’ve wanted to shave my head - just to see, you know?

Building the computer
I purchased my parts over two weeks, which is a dumb way to start, except it wound up saving me money sometimes because there are not killer deals on all components all at one time. Here’s what I picked up:

• AMD Semperon 2600+, $60. Retail kit with fan from Fry’s. I overpaid, but it was in front of me. I’m so over this whole generation of CPUs - psyched for Intel Q3 2006. Since I knew the mpeg encoder on the capture card was going to do most of the ‘heavy lifting,’ as tech writers say, I opted for something cheap and slowish. I did pick a motherboard that could accomodate an Ath64 down the line.
• The motherboard: Asus K8N, socket 754. Being a Mac guy, this socket nonsense really confused me, but all you have to do is pick a chip and then a mobo that supports it. I paid $75? Asus makes a nice board, I thought - everything was clearly laid out, except for the signal pin things like the hard drive activity light plug thing - how am I supposed to figure out the freaking polarity of the pins? I don’t know why, in 2005, it’s ever possible to plug something in upside down. Why? Make it so that there’s only one way to plug things in, nerds, jeez!
• CD/DVD: Fry’s special $40 Matsushita 8x DVD-DL burner. Works fine.
• Keyboard/mouse: intensely crappy but cheap Kensington keyboard and a nice Microsoft Starck mouse I got on sale for $5, $15 for both. I may splurge and get a Microsoft Remote Keyboard later.
• Graphics card: ATI 5600 thing? I don’t know. I should have actually gotten a mobo with onboard DVI instead of dropping $40 on this after rebate.
• Wireless: I made a mistake and got a D-Link card for $10 after rebate that my system just won’t recognize. I have no idea what the problem is - I’ll chuck it and get something that works.
• Capture card: Hauppauge WinTV-150. I should have gotten the bare card instead of the one that comes with the remote because the remote only works with Hauppauge’s garbage TV app that you’d be crazy to use and not Media Center. I paid $70 and should have paid $50 for just the card, no remote.
• Hard drive: I managed to get in on a 200gb Seagate 7200rpm 8mb cache drive for $40 after two rebates deal.
• Case: a gigantic Antec thing that was on sale for $40 at Best Buy after rebate. I was really impressed with Antec’s interior quality - everything fit perfectly, no sharp edges or metal burrs. The 350w power supply that came with is plenty for this box, and the case has good airflow and runs pretty quiet. You could get something CHEAP, but why risk having to go to the emergency room for a tetnus shot when you gash yourself on the inside of your $6 chassis trying to install the motherboard?
• Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: $90 from eBay, say.
• Grand total if you don’t make the mistakes I made: $420 or $330 if you happen to have a copy of XP MCE lying around. TiVo lifetime is $299 plus the cost of the box, although recently it seems like you can get them to give you money after rebates for buying a box.

Then what?
You corral your parts

and start putting things together.

Glitches I ran into building this, my first PC

• You screw in these motherboard spacers that keep the motherboard off the case, like short fat metal stilts, and I missed one. It doesn’t actually make a difference, but I could have been more careful at this step.
• My DVD-ROM didn’t work because I plugged it in the secondary IDE controller upside down. See my complaint about how it shouldn’t be possible to plug things in upside down this year. To be fair, the red stripe that runs along the outside of the cable is pin 1, and needs to be in the upper left-hand corner. That said, left is relative to your motherboard’s orientation.
• The power supply needed to be plugged in in two places on the motherboard. Who knew? I tried to turn on the machine and the fan spun for a second and stopped. I almost cried. Then I figured out I needed to plug in the second, petite power plug thing into the motherboard and it worked!
• This is a software issue, but the version of MCE I got needed a MPEG2 decoder to work and kept throwing up decoder errors until I fed it an MPEG2 decoder - I had to install the demo of Interactual WinDVD and then MCE calmed down. Crazy.

So here’s the machine put together and opened up.

It worked! This was the sweetest sight in the world. By the way, isn’t it interesting and kind of sad to see some random person’s apartment? I think so.

Exciting things about Windows Media Center
It seems to work pretty well, and it’s slick. Also, it takes plug-ins, like this one for the weather or this MAME frontend. (Other plugs here.) You can get a list of forthcoming movies, with box art, and sort them by year (great for catching movies you’ve missed and half-forgotten about) or rating. I don’t think TiVo does this but I’m probably wrong.

The bad news
It’s a buggy piece of shit, as you might expect from Microsoft. I have a trouble watching a pre-recorded show when the software is presently recording something else. Sometimes the video gets stuck and won’t unstick after I fastforward. Is this a drive issue? A CPU thing? Bugs? I don’t know, but TiVo handles those things like a champ.

The honesty I’m famous for
Building the PC was fun, but also kind of frustrating and took six hours if you count the time I spent shopping for stuff. I could do it again in two, but I wouldn’t really want to. If you just want TiVo, buy the TiVo and pay the cost to be the boss. Especially if you don’t care about their questionable data-sharing practices, or the ads that pop up, or the way they sort of like their customers but oh my god are so totally in love with the networks and the MPAA! I care, but I got into bed with Microsoft so obviously I don’t care that much. Buy the TiVo for your mom, too, if she’s anything like my mom. Build the PC if you want to build a PC and you get joy from playing Metal Slug 3 with a wireless joystick under an emulator that has a frontend that meshes with your TV, messing around with things, etc. For me, the building and the extensibility are the beauty part, not to mention that I’m happy to have another real computer around the house instead of just a set-top box.