Anyone built a PVR?
 

Hi Everyone,

Just curious if anyone on the forum has built a PC-based personal digital video recorder / media centre? I'm interested in moving into the 21st century and retiring my VCRs for good. Plus, I figure I should get on board and get something built before the broadcast flag rears its head again.

There's limited Tivo service here in Canada and it seems easiest to just build my own digital recorder. In no particular order, the requirements would be:

- Build-it-myself (save some $$$, maybe :))
- Windows, not Linux or Mac (more wife-friendly, and, in the case of the Mac, presumably cheaper)
- Two or three tuners (seems like many of the shows I want to 'record' are on the at the same time, i.e. The Simpsons and The Amazing Race are on at the same time in September)
- Relatively quiet: I don't want to hear a loud whirling power supply fan the whole time I'm watching The Simpsons
- "Audio/Video Component" form factor would be nice, i.e. it would be nice to stack it on top of (or under) my surround-sound amplifier (but this is a nice-to-have)
- Wireless keyboard, mouse & remote control
- Wireless LAN - No CAT 5 in the living room of my old house right now!
- DVD burner for obvious reasons
- Ability to record off of the tuners onto the hard drive while watching another program off the hard drive

I've got sixty-channel analog cable. I probably won't be going to HDTV, digital cable or a dish service any time soon, so tuners don't have to be that sophisticated.

Things I'm wondering about:

- Software: What do people like?

- Machine specs: What processor / RAM / Audio / Video / Hard Disk should this beast have? Particularly with the requirement to 'watch and record' at the same time?

- Digital audio out for surround sound: Should I consider this or just keep playing DVDs on the DVD player?

- Component Video out for DVDs...? See above

- Sending the signal elsewhere: Right now, if we have something 'taped' that we want to watch before bedtime the wife and I will just pop the tape into the VCR in the bedroom. If everything's on a hard drive on another floor of the house this gets more complicated. How do others get around this and 'watch' the PVR in another room? Burn a DVD? Rebroadcast the signal elsewhere in the house? (And if you do rebroadcast how do you control the PVR?)

...what else have I missed?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada

I haven't built one but I suggest you pick up a local HUB (magazine) and copy the specs on an MCE machine?

Here's an example from a computer store in YVR: http://www.atic.ca/index.php?page=LongDesc&sku=13461

As for transmitting to other rooms, I seem to remember Future Shop sold some wireless transmitters years ago for about $100. I have no idea if they still sell them.

I guess it comes down to do you want to use this as just a PVR or do you want to use it as a computer also? If you are going to just be using it as a PVR, you might want to consider a dual tuner TIVO to save some money. Or you could get two single tuner TIVO's and network them together one on your main TV and one on the bedroom (Tivo does support wireless) and then you could transfer back and forth as needed.

If you do want to go the PC route you could also look at this post about the bedroom TV, however you might not need the HD option.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=593647

For tuners I would suggest Hauppauge or http://www.hauppauge.com I have one of their tuners and it works well. If you are going to record 2-3 shows at a time, also consider getting a card with a hardware MPEG encoder to offload the processing on the card rather than the PC CPU.

I have started to see a lot of ASUS motherboards with digital audio out, and I bet a lot of dedicated audio cards have it as well. Many video cards will come with component video out as well, just be sure to read what ports and cables come with the card.

If you want exact product numbers PM me.

Brian

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/hspr-H102; Blazer/4.2) 16;320x320)

Geoff - I was in your exact situation last year, right down to the picky wife, and today my PVR is my wife's favorite toy.

I think your perfect solution is two Hauppauge cards, an ASUS Pundit series case, and Snapstream's Beyond TV 4 software.. You'll be up and running in an hour. The Pundit cases are an all-in-1 solution - motherboard, sound, video and networking built in. All you do is drop in a processor and go.

Please PM for more info, I can send you some pics of my setup.

There's limited Tivo service here in Canada and it seems easiest to just build my own digital recorder. In no particular order, the requirements would be:
[/QUOTE]

How do you have limited Tivo service. I thought you either have it or you don't. If you can make a cheaper/better dvr than Tivo then please share the formula with the rest of FT. Oh, yeah and just in case they try to close down your thread for not being travel related I am sure you want to record the Travel Channel with this DVR right! :p

Cheaper? Not the hardware itself, unfortunately, but a PC with a tuner card, GB-PVR and a free subscription to Zap2it gives you very similar functionality, with the ability to do all kinds of things with the resulting MPEG2 files. Geek skillz required, though.

>If you can make a cheaper/better dvr
>than Tivo then please share the formula with
>the rest of FT.

Well, I don't know about cheaper, but I'm sure if you build one you can make one that's *better*. I've never used a Tivo, but as I understand it, it only does one thing, but does it very well.

The problem is I want to do multiple things. A media centre does all the Tivo stuff, PLUS allows you to burn your programs to DVDs, provides a place to play and index your MP3s, plays & rips DVDs & CDs, allows you to surf the web from your couch, provides you a means to rip and edit vido from your camcorder, provides a videogaming platform and basically provides an expandable media server for your home.

You could certainly get boxen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxen> to do all this, but there's a lot to be said for one box sitting on top of your surround-sound amp that does it all.

As for Canada, I've heard conflicting reports as to how up-to-date the Tivo scheduling software is, and as I understand it you can't program the Tivo manually. There's also debate about pop-up ads, content flagging and possible software upgrades that will prevent skipping through commercials.

In theory you can avoid all that if you build your own.

>Oh, yeah and just in case they try to close
>down your thread for not being travel related

LOL - Actually, the main reason I'd build one is to record the shows I miss when I travel :)

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada

I built something like this about two years ago. It was fun, but ended up costing at least twice as much as a TiVo. If you still want to push ahead, I can testify that using Hauppauge PVR-250 capture cards and SageTV software works pretty well.

Another suggestion is that if you do this, install Logmein on the computer. This will let you control the computer remotely, so if you find yourself out of town you can still make or change recordings.

My tivo streams mp3's, and radio stations, shows my photo collection, shows traffic information , the weather and movie times, it links with my PC to rip its content and convert to mpeg4 without any intervention. The debate about content flagging and disabling the 30 second skip is all just based on rumors.

I built a MCE machine approximately a year ago, with dual DVB tuners and it is absolutely awesome. I did this because I can't get Tivo here in Spain and it only took me a short time to get used to the differences between the two. They're selling complete systems with tuners, remotes, and big hard disks for something like $600 now so I don't know that it's worth doing the build-it-yourself thing anymore.

TV recording works for me pretty much the same way as Tivo did; there's not any "suggested" recordings, but those were seldom of interest to me anyway. What I like is the other stuff that MCE does so well: picks up the US TV shows I download with uTorrent and RSS feeds, burns a show to DVD just using the remote, manages music and photos (and does a cool slideshow mixing the two), syncs my newly-recorded TV shows to my Portable Media Center for use on the plane or elsewhere, lets me watch stuff on demand through Online Spotlight, and lets me view what's being recorded, manage recordings, and add new ones via the web anywhere in the world. It also handles teletext and subtitles really well (something important for me here).

I tried the open-source MediaPortal, BeyondTV, and a couple of other wannabes, but there were way too many rough edges. The real drawback is that all the others rely on XMLTV for scraping TV listings off of newspaper web sites, etc. and the results are at best spotty. MCE includes a (free) guide subscription that is similar to what the Tivo has, so you can search by actor, keyword, etc.

I've built a MythTV box. You can do a LOT of amazing stuff, but its quite expensive to get up and running...probably not as bad as MSE though.

I'm moving towards putting Mac Minis at each TV and streaming VOB (DVD files) and captured TV content from a 1.3 terabyte drive.... Myth is great for the idea of a centralized server with very simple head units at each TV...

The issue I have is capturing the content. We get our locals in HD over the air, but the rest come in through satellite and currently there is no legal way to get get DSS directly into a computer....so until that changes, I'm sticking with my HD Tivos and my dream mentioned above.

If you aren't in the HD bind, then by all means, look into MythTV. Its pretty nifty. You can get by with something like a 1.5ghz box and 1gb of RAM....depending on you encoder card you may need more power though.

There is even an interface for the XBOX to make it a front end!

-N

Both tuners in my MCE box are HD capable.

I probably mis-spoke. Its fairly easy to find inexpensive Over The Air HD tuners. But what about DiscoveryHD and HBO and Showtime (the later 2 represent like 85% of our tv watching)- I dont know of any cards that will legally pull that content from satellite. I have heard that DirecTV is working with Microsoft on a DTV card though, thats pretty slick!

Another option I've been playing with is to use bittorrent like a TiVo...that is, use something like Azarus to scour torrent sites and download shows when they appear.... not exactly on the up and up, but I'm already paying for something like 500 channels...who cares where I get it from?

Yeah, I get loads of customers who magically think that their OTA HDTV tuners will somehow work with satellite or digital cable. They don't, and in Canada (especially Western Canada), there's virtually no HD content broadcast OTA. For European Satellites, Hauppauge has a few options (Nexus series), but nothing for North American satellite series. Mostly this is due to digital content protection. This isn't so much of a concern in Europe as it is in North America.

Presently, about the only solution if you're using satellite is to get a high-resolution video capture card and a universal Windows MCE remote. You can wire your satellite receiver through your video capture card (don't use a TV tuner, they don't do HDTV resolution). Not sure if there's any YPbPr or HDMI capture cards out yet (I've not seen any, but that doesn't mean they don't EXIST), but that's probably going to be your best bet unless you're happy with 480p which is I think the peak Svideo can output.