Building a silent PC for MythTV

I started using MythTV a few years ago as an experiment. My main intention was to access foreign-language TV and radio broadcasts on my lounge TV but I was amazed at the power and flexibility of this open-source PVR when I gave it a trial run.

My original MythTV PC recently hit the buffers, so I've built a new box with the following components:

• Antec Fusion NSK-2480 case
• Scythe mini-ninja (eBay) 
• AMD Athlon II X3 400E Triple Core CPU
• LiteOn IHOS104-32 4x Internal Blu-Ray BD-ROM
• Seasonic X-460FL 460W ATX Fanless PSU
• CORSAIR 4GB 1333MHz CL9 DDR3 Memory Kit
• ASUS M4A78LT-M LE motherboard
• 2 x Western Digital WD10EARS 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 64MB 
• Noctua NF-S12B 120mm case fan
• Sparkle GT220 coolpipe graphics card (passively cooled) 

This setup works well for a media centre PC because it is effectively silent. You might just pick up a feint whine from the hard disks if you are close to the PC but otherwise you can't hear it. The Noctua fan is completely silent at around 600rpm and is sufficient to cool the heatsink on the now-discontinued Scythe mini-ninja, so there is no need for a dedicated CPU fan. Likewise, the Seasonic PSU, although pricey, is also silent. Seasonic in the Netherlands told me the Antec Fusion NSK-2480 case and this PSU are a good match because of the "headroom" in this case.

I am currently running MythTV 0.24 under Suse Linux. A few Mythtv users have reported that the video runs in "slow motion" under this version, something which I managed to fix (on the basis of a forum post) by setting the audio output to ALSA:pulse.

High-definition Freeview has just arrived in my area. This is progressively being rolled out across the UK and uses the DVB-T2 standard. PC hardware to decode this signal is very new although the PCTV systems nanoStick T2 290e DVB-T2 USB tuner is available which I am currently running under Windows 7.  This works fine under PCTV's own software but under Windows Media Center the audio drifts out of sync with the video. This seems be a common problem with Windows Media Center (which doesn't occur with MythTV) and there doesn't seem to be a solution. The use of Windows 7 for high definition Freeview is a stopgap as far as I am concerned so I am watching with interest the development of a Linux driver.

Update: driver for the nanoStick T2 now built into the Linux Kernel.