Best hackable set-top device...?
Hey all;
Currently I have a cheapass home entertainment system consisting of a hacked XBox running XBMC ("Bob") and a G4 PPC Mac running Ubuntu Feisty ("Mediacenter"). The Mac has a bigass USB drive attached to it, and is mainly an rTorrent host and storage medium for the XBox, since I found XBMC works better than MythTV (I'm on Comcast Digital so I can't really DVR).
Lately I'm finding the Mac is a bit heavy to maintain just for rTorrent and storage, plus I can't seem to build an rTorrent later than 0.6.4, which means I can't do protocol encryption, so I'm considering making it a proper server box and moving the rTorrent/storage duties to some other appliance, which I'd like to be a small, quiet form factor.
So my choices are:
1. Go out and buy a Shuttle or other similar SFF PC new, or
2. Find a hackable SFF device being sold for cheap I can exploit.
I've seen some of the stuff being done with the Western Digital MyBook platform, and am wondering whether that would make a suitable host for my needs, or whether there's some other device du jour that everyone else would recommend. Ideally, it would be fairly trivial to add external storage to the device via USB or NAS.
Thoughts...?
Currently I have a cheapass home entertainment system consisting of a hacked XBox running XBMC ("Bob") and a G4 PPC Mac running Ubuntu Feisty ("Mediacenter"). The Mac has a bigass USB drive attached to it, and is mainly an rTorrent host and storage medium for the XBox, since I found XBMC works better than MythTV (I'm on Comcast Digital so I can't really DVR).
Lately I'm finding the Mac is a bit heavy to maintain just for rTorrent and storage, plus I can't seem to build an rTorrent later than 0.6.4, which means I can't do protocol encryption, so I'm considering making it a proper server box and moving the rTorrent/storage duties to some other appliance, which I'd like to be a small, quiet form factor.
So my choices are:
1. Go out and buy a Shuttle or other similar SFF PC new, or
2. Find a hackable SFF device being sold for cheap I can exploit.
I've seen some of the stuff being done with the Western Digital MyBook platform, and am wondering whether that would make a suitable host for my needs, or whether there's some other device du jour that everyone else would recommend. Ideally, it would be fairly trivial to add external storage to the device via USB or NAS.
Thoughts...?
