Since the early days of Tivo Series 1, I have been pining to make improvements to it. Back in the day, I desperately wanted to network the box (no Ethernet back then) through the serial port, add a hard drive, and burn the recordings to a DVD. By the time I studied the procedure and was ready to purchase additional parts — Series 2 hit the market and contained most of those features.

A few years later, I have replaced Tivo with the DVRs from my cable company. While these boxes are more convenient than a Tivo, they are extremely limited and lack basic functions — like a working search.

I have decided that it is time to build a DVR from scratch. This box will extend the standard definition of DVR. It’s a media center. It can record television, burn and rip DVDs, download and stream movies from the Internet, play MP3s and CDs and ”surf” the Web.

I’ll be “blogging” the entire media box building process. I will cover the very first step of picking out the software/hardware through having it up and running and downloading porn.

I guess the question I keep asking myself all these years is “do I need to do this?” Of course not, but then again,  Columbus didn’t *need* to go to the moon.

 Proposed Specs:

• Mythbuntu (Ubuntu Distro running MythTV)
• HTPC Case (Model Undecided)
• DVICO FusionHDTV5 Express, HDTV Tuner, ATSC, QAM, PCI Express
• 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drives