In the early 2ks, computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case. I wanted to build a silent computer to watch Divx movies from my bed, but as a broke teen, I just had access to disposed hardwares I could find there and there.

I dismantled a power supply, stuck mosfets to big mother fucking dissipator, and I had a silent power supply. I put another huge industrial dissipator on CPU (think it was an AMD k6 500Mhz) and had fanless cooling. Remained the hard drive.

Live CD/USB weren’t common at that time. I’ve discovered a live CD distrib (I think it was Knoppix) that could run entirely from RAM.

I removed hard drive, boot on live distrib, then replace CD by my Divx and voila.

Having a fanless-harddriveless computer was pure science fiction for me and my friends at that time.

Meshroom is FOSS, relatively easy to use and works out of the box. It is industrial quality and is widely used in cinema and untertainment industry. So, I think it’s the go to if you want something robust and usable.

NVidia provide several reasearch software to do Radiance Field stuff on their github: https://github.com/NVlabs. They gives impressive results, but none of them is user friendly. It’s reasearch stuff.