The Retelling of a Myth: Fin

My MythBox has been in service for nearly two weeks now - and I haven't had a single problem in nearly as long. It's quite remarkable that I was able to construct such an appliance for under $400 USD, and I owe most of those remarks to VIA and their lovely Mini-ITX EPIA C7 platform. They've crammed ten pounts of digital goodness into a five pound bag, and made it all passively cooled to boot. While it may not benchmark the fastest, it benchmarks as the most useful and power-efficient general purpose plaform I've ever used. The EPIA doesn't work faster - it works smarter by building in acceleration for what you actually need. Cryptography, MPEG2, audio and TV-out are all done intelligently by chipsets design for that specific purpose. That means you, yes you, get to reap the benefits of an extremely fast and jitter-free MythTV box without the cost, power consumption, size or complexity of a regular mobo/CPU combo. And VIA understands how Linux is crucial to their enterprise, and has worked towards providing support likewise. Open-sourcing their driver base is a smart step.. let's just hope they continue to document their chipsets and offer open-source implementation, as well as Linux driver support around every corner. If they do, I promise to keep buying. Deal? Deal.

Also, one should be greatly impressed by the Myth team's gusto. They've brought Linux together and have shown the world that this nimble little behemoth of an OS can really make a tremendous splash. Indeed, one almost gets a feeling as if this was Linux's endgame, and all the pieces of the puzzle are now being assembled; all that remains are the easy pieces inside the corners.

One also should give mad props to the community at large, which has taken it upon their anti-anti-social selves to document every living, breathing attempt to get a myriad of hardware configurations to run Myth. Indeed, these past five blog posts are my contribution back to the lukewarm saline pool that holds our collective brains. Without the dozens of blog, newsgroup and forum posts out in the wild I never would have been able to build this box. Thanks to this modern era of communications, n00bs everywhere are being schooled at the speed of light.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 20 back episodes of The Daily Show to watch.