Well I realize that it has been quite a while since my last post. Unfortunately I was away for a while so I haven't had time to work with the Efika but that is changing now. I am currently getting a build environment together and investigating video cards to use. A card with a range out video outputs (composite, S-Video, component) and hardware MPEG2 decoding is really what I am looking for.

As well, I am investigating options for a case and power supply. I would like to use an external power supply to shrink the case as small as possible but may have to go with some sort of internal power supply. There are a number of exciting case designs that other people have come up with.

On Tuesday around 2 PM I received the e-mail with FedEx tracking number. FedEx's site said it would arrive around 5 PM on today. Then I checked the tracking site yesterday morning and saw that it was out for delivery already - it was delivered at 12:56 PM - less than 24 hours after the shipping information was received by FedEx - I was very impressed.

When I got home I was ready to open that box and get started but I wanted to take it slow and document it. I took some pictures as I opened it up. The funny thing is that the shipping box had a fragile sticker in one corner and that corner was crushed - however the other corners were fine :-)

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to power it up yet but hopefully that will come tonight.

Well, with the Efika boards soon (hopefully) to be on their way out to developers, it won't be long now before I will be able to get to work on this. In anticipation, I have got my MythTV setup prepared for a separate front-end and I build a test one on a x86 system to ensure that I won't have any problems from that end.

I have been giving this more thought and have decided that for now it will be a front-end only and not adding a capture card. This is meant to be a cheap but powerful front-end that can be setup at the various TVs around someone's house.

Like many others, I am waiting to hear the final hardware specs so I can begin to figure out how this is going to work. I am hoping that the on-board graphics chip or the FPGA will be able to provide TV-output. If not, then I will have to go with one of the boards with the PCI slot and use an external card with TV-output.

One possibility if going this direction is to use a Hauppauge PVR-350. This has the advantage of providing both TV-input and TV-output. However, as the Efika system is meant to focus on being a MythTV frontend, the TV-input isn't absolutely necessary.

The other thing I am working on right now is trying to decide whether to go with an existing Linux distro or build a custom one for this. The advantage of going with a custom distro is that it would be able to be much smaller, which would add the possibility of running the system off of a small flash memory card (Compact Flash?).