Linux Beach MultiMedia Center 1000

Better than Tivo! MythTV ready to go!
HDTV ready!
Record and view at same time!
10 USB & 3 Firewire 800 ports for high-speed expansion
Digital Audio and 8 Channel Analog Output
Extremely Quiet System
Infrared Remote Control
Gigabit Ethernet LAN
TV Tuner, S-Video and Composite Input
Store 200 hours of Video or much more Audio
S-Video, DVI and VGA output
Support for Dual Monitor or TV & Monitor
Dual Core AMD Athlon 64 Processor
Ubuntu Linux with complete MultiMedia Support
Also available in Antec Overture II Quiet Media Case

Quick Story: AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+, 1024MB DDR400, 400GB HD, 16x DL DVD+/-RW, Nvidia nForce4 chipset, Nvidia GeForce 6600GT PCI-E16 video with 256MB, Hauppauge PVR-150 TV Tuner with MPEG2 hardware encoding. Shown here with optional monitor, keyboard & mouse. One Year Warranty on Parts & Labor. Three Year Warranty on CPU.

[Detailed Specifications]

Take a Virtual Screen Shot Tour!

[More Pictures]

The Linux Beach MultiMedia Center 1000 will be the center of your home entertainment, information, communications and local control system. It is a high-powered Linux computer that connects to the Internet and your local network, and interfaces with your television and home audio system to provide you with unparalleled centralization and utilization of all your home electronics resources.

Not only does it have 3 Firewire ports, they are all the newest 800Mb/s Firewire ports. In addition it has SPIDIF digital audio in and out to drive your surround sound 5.1 or 7.1 audio system and 8 channels out to directly drive analog amplifiers, a parallel printer and two RS232 com ports for legacy peripherals, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and 10 USB 2.0 ports for everything else. Video out can be had via standard analog VGA, digital DVI or S-Video for the TV. Two monitor or a monitor and TV can be used differently at the same time. The TV is properly setup with overscan so that everything appears as it should. Video can be captured with the TV tuner, composite or S-Video in. Finally gigabyte LAN gives you the tightest possible connection to the world.

AMD took the lead in processor technology when it came out with a 64bit CPU that respected the installed base of 32 bit software and was not priced beyond the means of most users. The Athlon64 2X puts two 64 bit CPUs into one package and allows us to bring you a true dual processor system for a price that would have been a dream only a few years ago. Dual channel memory management on the CPU provides an effective memory bus speed of 800 MHz. and the 1GB memory can be expanded to 4GB.

The Nvidia nForce4 chipset on the mainboard provides the best PCI timing, 3Gb/s SATA II and RAID 1,0, 10 capabilities. Two PCI and two PCI-Ex1 slots are available for expansion. The Nvidia GeForce video output is driven at twice the speed of AGP 8X through the PCI-Express16 port. The hard drive uses the latest SATA II technology and sports twice the cache of most of its competitors. The Sony double-layer DVD rewritable does it all. It will read and write all your DVDs and CDROMs and it will do it fast, up to 8.5GB on a disk. You'll be able to play all your DVD movies to the TV out and with full Dolby surround sound and you'll be able to run it all from your easy chair with the remote control.

Computers are usually very noisy beasts. Not so here! This system was designed from the ground up to be whisper quiet because it was designed for the home. First, it is in the Antec Sonata II case, which has been well designed with low noise in mind. It uses a robust SmartPower2.0 450 watt power supply that is actually smart enough to turn its fan off when it's not needed, and the very quiet CPU fan is further rpm controlled by AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology. Don't worry though; we put blue LEDs on the front so that you can tell when it is on.

If you prefer a horizontal configuration, this system is available in the Antec Overture II Quiet Media Case for the same price. Overture II is the updated version of Antec's classic, timeless enclosure design for high-performance media center systems. With its elegant piano-black finish, blue LED illumination and chrome accents, Overture II blends gracefully into any living space. This case features 2 x 5.25" external drive bays, 2 x 3.5" external drive bays, and 2 x 3.5" internal hard drive bays. All drives are mounted in removable trays and like the Sonata II case, 2 USB, a firewire and audio ports are located on the front.

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. [from the Ubuntu Linux website]

All of this hardware is powered by Ubuntu Linux. This means that you are running a high powered UNIX operating system on a dual 64 bit processor machine. All of the network services you might need for a full service Internet server are there, including Apache 2.0 with PHP, perl and MySQL. Postfix, SpamAssassin, Mailman, sshd and the SAMBA MSWindows server are also included. This is an open source system and the complete software development system is included, including lots of source code and documentation. Tinker on! For a desktop interface you have your choice of either Gnome or KDE running on top of Xorg XWindows with Nvidia TwinView support. The Mozilla FireFox browser and Thunderbird mail application will probably be your main Internet clients, but you'll have lots of choices. Open Office 2.0 will handle your MS Office compatible work tasks, the GIMP handles your graphics editing and the list goes on. Hundreds of applications programs are included and thousand more can be download and installed over the net. Most of them are free,

MythTV heads a line-up of some of the finest multimedia software to be found anywhere. MythTV allows this system to maintain an updated schedule of local TV programs, schedule those programs to be recorded for future viewing, view live TV and record while viewing, archive recorded shows and view them on demand from anyplace on the network. MythTV is like Tivo on steroids and will change the way you view TV.

With the optional pcHDTV HD5500 board, the LBMC 1000 becomes a system that will allow you to watch and record high definition TV and a dual tuner system that can now watch one channel while recording another, or record two channels at once. Ask us how the system can be expanded to record as many as six channels at once.

MPlayer will play your DVDs and virtually any other type of Video/Audio file you can find. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies.

XMMS will do much more than play your mp3 and other audio files. It will allow you to create play lists and visual displays to go with the music.

A keyboard and mouse will be necessary for most administrative and normal computer functions, we recommend the wireless keyboard and mouse as being particularly convenient at home, but most day-to-day audio/video functions can be controlled by the included 43 button infrared remote. The remote can even be used as a mouse to operate other programs and the irblaster allows the LBMS 1000 to control other devices.