Build Your Own PVR - personal video recorder - out of an old PC

[Dover]

Build Your Own PVR, Then Trash It


First, the good news. Plummeting storage costs and the availability of special hardware have finally made it cheap and easy to shrug off the shackles of TiVo and build your own personal video recorder out of an old PC.

The bad news is digital-rights management technologies will probably make your homebrew PVR obsolete faster than you can say "Super Bowl Sunday."

It was a Super Bowl sale that inspired this reporter to undertake assembly of his own home media center, which proved both delightfully easy and cheap, ringing in at less than $200 -- about the same as 18 months of subscription dues to TiVo.

I started with a program called GBPVR, a free (but not open-source) solution developed by a New Zealander named Graeme Blackley. It's configurable and has an active developer community building plug-ins and skins.

GBPVR plays nicely with a unique $100 extender device called the MediaMVP that sits in the living room and bridges your computer to your TV and stereo. It's about the size of a CD wallet, and is powered by PowerPC chip and a trimmed down version of Linux...cont'd


http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70328-0.html?tw=wn_index_3

[slor]

1. Cool...thanks for posting n/t

[Canuckistanian]

2. Thanks! I could use this

[emulatorloo]

3. Or you could save yourself the headache and buy a Tivo for 49.00

and pay 300.00 for lifetime service = 350.00

Tivo has a heck of an interface and is very easy to use out of the box.

vs 200.00 and a lot of work tinkering and configuring.

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

4. TiVo just announced it was cancelling its lifetime service program

Sorry.

[emulatorloo]

5. Well then hurry up and buy because it is still available now

I just visited the website and lifetime service is still available. I just visited the Worst Buy yesterday and they had the larger Tivo units for 70.00 after rebate.

I bought my Tivo about a year after they came out and I paid way more than 70.00 -- and I never ever regretted it. I bought a cheapy Tivo type unit a couple of years ago for another TV and it really is a pain to use. YMMV

[northzax]

8. you know that that is the lifetime of the unit, right?

not your lifetime. Someone steals your TiVo, it burns in a fire, it breaks out of warranty, and you zero out. you upgrade, and you zero out. not that good of a deal.

[RoyGBiv]

6. DRM ...

I hate to but-in with my regular rant, and I will keep it short, but this is exactly the sort of thing that should concern people about DRM. Preventing teenagers from downloading music is not and never has been the overriding point. The point is to force consumers to be slaves to the corporation if you want the content, and this will eventually extend to everything, including those lovely clips from news shows and the Daily Show posted here occasionally. You don't pay, you don't see or hear or even know.

The FOSS community must be supported and encouraged now while we still have a shot at hedging against this corporate monolith. I take exceptional umbrage at the author of this article for basing his project on a proprietary (not open source) software solution. (While his solution was free, as in beer, it was not free, as in land of and thus still a part of the problem.) I am especially irritated at this because so many OSS solutions already exist and are widely available and supported for this kind of project.

I'll shut up now.

[Celebration]

7. you got that right

And so now it extends to things like seeds and roads. And you can't even go to most museums any more without tripping all over some corporate name in each room. I think we probably ought to stop using the word fascism for this (I know you didn't but some people do, and it is too emotionally charged). A more appropriate word is probably feudalism--where everything we do or buy has to be corporate. Sure we "own" the corporations through 401ks etc., but who controls them? The feudal lords......................

Not sure if I am going to build my own digital recorder though. I am probably part of the problem too.

[Bruce McAuley]

9. Video capture cards are getting cheaper...

I just installed one in my PC, and am using it for surveillance of my property, but there's no reason it can't be used to capture video from your TV as welol as a camera, and it only means you need a card with different jacks in the back.
My card's good for as many hours of recording space as I have on my hard drive, and is adaptable to external drives as well.
I'm still playing with it, but it looks like a very cheap solution to recording video digitally.
The cards cost around $35 on eBay, and are made in China, but my geek friend says they are very robust, and with the English Pack to make the conversion to english characters easy, it's simple to use.
I'm thinking of buying one for TV to computer plug-in, but I gotta upgrade my hard drive to something bigger than the 20 GB I have now.
These cards will work on Pentium III machines with 500Mhz or faster chips, and Windows 98 or better software.
I'm sold.

Bruce

[OhioNerd]

10. I have an ATI AIW 9800 Pro

It's a card that does all the cool video stuff of a DVR and has it's own software to enable that use. I had tinkered with it in a number of different boxes, but never really built a DVR out of it. I was just about to invest in a Full Tower case with a 4 disk RAID 5 array of 320gb Western Digital SATA drives, the 9800 Pro and perhaps even some extra tuner cards and of course, a couple of DVD burners.
But then I realized that I could get a DVR from Warner Cable (my local provider), for only about $3.50/mo. I can "handle" two shows at one time, which means that I can do any combination of recording or watching two channels at one time. The interface is easy to use an understand, and I have been using it a LOT in the couple of weeks since I got it.

I'm not shilling for Time-Warner. I actually dislike them a fair amount due to the myriad and creative ways they have found to aggravate me, without even trying. And they DO sell your e-mail addresses to spammers, no matter what they say.
However, the product itself (The DVR box) is quite good and even though I could build a multi-terrabyte storage arry running on a Beowulf Cluster and record EVEYTHING, I choose to rent the DVR box from TW because it fills my need at a very low price. Just food for thought.