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Under Linux, you can use the kernel bttv driver, the current CVS of lirc, and MythTV to make a PVR that works better than the software bundled with the card. If all you want is simple TV playback, tvtime will do that. (tvtime's useful to keep around for TV-card debugging anyway, and it's more polished than xawtv.)

(If you buy the NTSC version of this card and want to use it under Linux, you'll need to edit drivers/media/video/bttv-cards.c so that the tuner will be set up properly. Search for "Leadtek WinFast 2000/ WinFast 2000 XP", scroll down to the .tuner_type= line, and change it from 5 to TUNER_PHILIPS_NTSC. If you don't do this, the tuner and the remote control won't work properly.)

Under linux you really can't beat the hauppauge PVR 250 or 350. Both include hardware mpeg2 encoding, the 350 includes hardware mpeg2 decoding. You can find drivers at ivtv.sf.net. It's nice to record tv shows at 640x480 at 2% cpu load.

The card is also well supported by mythtv.

No, buy this card. Linux support!! And MythTV is adding support.

Freevo

MythTV

Good Luck!

I'm playing around building a media computer right now...have an old P3 600 I'm using...loading it up with harddrives. I've got quite a .flac library of my CD's now, and is great for parties (no one messes up the discs, etc, and anyone can play DJ)

I'm about to start the video part of the project. I'm going with MythTV. However, if you're wanting to do things like watch live tv and record...you'll need either a video capture card WITH hardware compression built in...or a much faster CPU. MythTV is now supporting the WinTV PVR...so, I'm hoping this will work for me. Go check out the site..there is some good info there and there are neat things you can do with the system...Weather, etc.

MythTV

My linux box is back in my dorm room, but I think the nvidia drivers are mostly closed source. They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL.

I just had a run-in with a driver that demonstrates why an open-source driver is much preferred. Until now, I've not had reason to tweak driver source to get something working.

Over the past few days, I've been setting up a MythTV box on a spare machine. This machine is equipped with a Radeon VE clone (built by FIC, IIRC) with S-video/composite output. I grabbed the GATOS driver source, built that, and got the TV-out jack working great...

...until I moved the computer from the bedroom to the living room and tried firing it up with just the TV plugged in.

The X server detected that nothing was plugged into the VGA port and said "no video for you!" Isolating the offending code and fixing it so it'll work with just the TV-out jack in use was just a few minutes' work. (The patch was posted to the gatos-devel mailing list, if anybody's interested.)

If the driver supplied by nVidia for its cards exhibited the same behavior (since I don't have any of their cards at home, I can't say if they do), what would you do? Lash up some sort of dongle to fool the card into thinking a monitor is plugged in, and hope you don't blow up your card? That doesn't sound like much of a plan.

Hmmm - I can rip a DVD to a 1600kbps xVid file in about 2 hours using the ripper in MythTV (MythDVD and transcode as the backend). It takes 15 min or so to rip the VOB file, about 2 hours or so to encode it.
This is with a XP2000+ and gentoo linux, strangely DVD rips on my XP1800+ under winXP take 8 hours or so and even with some careful scrutiny I can't see the difference.

Beats me why it does that , but I don't complain, I just rip them all with MythDVD now ;-)

Hmmm... What if you could have the mythical convergence box of the future - today!
MythTV does the trick for me.

Games, music, movies, web browsing, TV (timeshifting and recording), DVDs, pictures, weather...
What else do you need in the ultimate set-top box? MythTV does all of these.

I have a VERY short attention span ("that dog has a puffy tail! c'mere puff!!" [Homer]) but right now I'm focused completely on MythTV I'm actually in the middle of installing and tweaking it right now, it mostly runs now. If I get it working seamlessly (meaning that it passes The Wife Test (tm)) then it will be the uberdevice in my house. Onscreen news and local weather Stream MP3s Play/Rip/Burn DVDs Timeshift TV and skip commercials Yes, quite uber.

Clickable link!

Cecil and Dale really are doing a great job with this project. For some hardware this works 'right out of the box'. There is also an active forum on their website website

Between this site and MythTV's, it's really not bad to set up a working system fast.

Perhaps what's even better is that because knoppmyth is based on Knoppix (and thus on Debian) , it allows you to apt-get update to upgrade (most) of your software as needed. What isn't updated with an apt-get gets updated with Cecil and Dale' upgrade scripts as new versions come out (without touching your data). The only thing that I could think of that would make this cooler is for them to put together an apt repository on their own to track the project's changes.

Anyway... Do check it out.

--JP

Tivo monthly cost: $12.95/mo.

MythTV monthly cost: $0/mo.

Let's say you scrounge up some parts and build a whole MythTV system for $400. We'll use the 40hr Tivo at $200 after rebate. So, twice as much for the MythTV rig.

You'll break even in price after 15 months. Starting in the 16th month, you'll be saving money as compared to the Tivo. And that savings will continue to grow over time, for as long as you use the PVR.

So if you plan on using your PVR for at least a year, it's CHEAPER to build the MythTV box.

Tivo monthly cost: $12.95/mo.

MythTV monthly cost: $0/mo.

Let's say you scrounge up some parts and build a whole MythTV system for $400. We'll use the 40hr Tivo at $200 after rebate. So, twice as much for the MythTV rig.

You'll break even in price after 15 months. Starting in the 16th month, you'll be saving money as compared to the Tivo. And that savings will continue to grow over time, for as long as you use the PVR.

So if you plan on using your PVR for at least a year, it's CHEAPER to build the MythTV box.

>>Can't press "record" on the TiVo from work, now can you?

>Um, yes, actually.

This is misleading. By "..press 'record' on the TiVo from work..." I presume the poster means scheduling recordings over the internet. This cannot be done with a stock TiVo, at least with the Series2 I have. One must purchase the pricey ($99) "Home Media Option" to be able to do this. With MythTV and SnapStream it comes for free.

I think MythTV as mentioned in the article would be something for you. It's got a web control interface as an optional module.

Your processor may be a problem though as the computer needs to do coding and decoding on the fly (to enable the "pause" features).

You best bet may be the Hauppage 350 card since it can do both decoding and encoding in hardware, thereby offloading the processor. It also has a remote control if you need one.

• MSI MATX I865PEM2-ILS
• Samsung black combo 52X24X52+16X CD-RW/DVD
• WAG311GE Netgear Wireless .11ABG+ PCI
• Intel P4 2,6GHz 800/512K
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• MSI GeForce FX5200 TD128 with DVI and TV-OUT
• 512MB PC400 DDRAM
• Maxtor Dmax Plus9 200Gb 7200RPM 8Mb SATA
• Coolermaster ATC 620C-BX1

The reasoning for the different items are as follows:

A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.

Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.

WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.

Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.

Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.

MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.

Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.

Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.

Now all I have to do is wait...

To be really useful, a homemade pvr has to solve the problem of obtaining program listings.

May I direct your attention to this.

This is currently what MythTV uses.

Regards
elFarto

Unfortunately for the free PVR software packages, there is no free guide data. xmltv can be (and is widely) used, but it typically grabs data by scraping from zap2it, where there the TOS explicitly forbids this ("you may not modify, copy, frame, cache, reproduce, sell, publish, transmit, display or otherwise use any portion of the Content"). If Freevo or MythTV got large enough to show up on Tribune Media Services' (the owner of zap2it) radar, they'd be squashed like bugs.

Too bad no one offers a subscription-based xmltv feed.

I have sent back 3 TiVo's...

Try this -- you need a standard computer, and a couple of TV cards.

If you purchase a card that can do hardware encoding/decoding (a Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 or 350, for example), that is well-supported under Linux, the rest of the system won't have to be too powerful, and a MiniITX board would work brilliantly. However, if you want to encode things in software (to XViD, for instance), you might need a meatier processor, as a VIA processor might choke.

Some useful links:
MythTV requirements
And for Freevo
PVR Database

Hope that helps.

Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.

Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.

With the new broadcast flag system on it's way in, soon advertisers will pay a little extra to have an equivalent flag which does not allow the commercials to be skipped or forwarded through. It will be illegal for a pvr to allow any of those functions that we enjoy now. So unless you're gonna roll your own, don't worry about TiVO running anyone out of business. It'll only let them target you more specifically, which I suppose may not be the worst part of it... And (probably redundant) but I'm sure 9.1% of all ads are already currently going unwatched, since I'm not gonna go get a beer during the friggin show...

The dorm I was in during college was built in the 50s, but did have a 4-plug outlet on 3 of the 4 walls. With a few powerstrips it was enough.

My apartment also has (nearly) enough outlets. Our major complaint is that it is a 2 bedroom and 1 bedroom has a TV outlet (used for cable modem and mythtv). The other room has a phone outlet.

I have the TV Wonder VE, which is essentially the TV tuner part of this card (well it turns out to be more complicated than that, but for argument's sake).

The applications for watching and recording TV shows suck. Real bad. I have the latest version from their website too.

The best program I encountered was Snapstream, and it works with the card reviewed in this article. But it uses ACCESS and Jet to store tv shows, and can you guess what happened 3x before my trial period was over? That's right, corrupt database.

One further note, these cards will NOT work with Myth TV, the linux option. The TV Wonder series does work with Myth, though.

It's probably a distro built around MythTV. MythTV uses a very very similar frontend/backend technology. It's a PVR, a DVD player, a transcoder, MP3 player, and it makes julienne fries! I've been following the project, and I know that there's an Xbox front-end version. Of course, to do the PVR stuff (Myth's bread & butter) you'd need a backend PC with a TV tuner card or two, and a stiff bit of processor...

PC-based systems don't *have* to have clunky, complicated user interfaces. I've been fiddling around with this stuff for about a year now, and what I have at the moment (apart from the noise) is about as good as one can reasonably get.

I'm using Freevo to provide the user interface, along with a simple IR receiver and remote for input. I went with this rather than MythTV because the latter involves the extra administrative overhead of a database -- with Freevo, I can simply drop files into a directory and it'll include them on in the menus.

All that said, the whole thing is rather more work than I'd like it to be. Once it's set up it largely "just works", but getting all the bits set up took quite a lot of effort. Unfortunately I still haven't seen a "black box" device that does everything I want, and that includes the subject of this review.

My next step would be to look at building something on based the VIA M10000, but my understanding is that the TV-out subsystem on those doesn't support widescreen resolutions. A pity, because otherwise it looks ideal.

(I've written a number of short articles on building this sort of system, the most useful is probably this one.

Honestly, I don't agree with either setup, since there are some times when I want to watch a show but am physically unable to sit in front of the TV, and the broadcast flag will lock the ability to record said shows out of OSS/free projects like mythtv. But shouldn't we at least know what we're complaining about?

I don't have a TV tuner card so I dunno about the last point. I have gotten TV working on a friends machine, but none of the TV programs seemed very good, and interlacing was very noticeable and annoying compared to windows based TV programs.


I had the same problem until I found tvtime. Great program for using a tv tuner in Linux. It has some built-in filters to fix interlacing and also supports 16:9 format and has progressive scan filters.
It's better than any windows-based TV program I've used. The only complaint is that it's relatively new and doesn't support recording.

There's also freevo and MythTV if you want PVR. However, I couldn't tell you anything about them... I haven't gotten around to trying them because I've already got PVR on my receiver. But they both look pretty nice.

You need Mythtv setup with at least Mythmusic (screenshot). It's perfect for this and it was designed to be easily used with a remote and a television monitor.

It will play/rip/visualize/navigate your music collection and if your using Debian or Mandrake is just a quick apt/urpmi away (for Mandrake configure urpmi to use Thacs RPM's first, as described on the site).

You want Myth TV or Freevo.

Sorry, just being a smart-ass. Computers are migrating into newer places, like the living room. Try watching a movie with your girlfriend without her commenting on how much louder your computer is (with the Athlon, 5 fans and the 2 120 gig drives) then the old fashioned stand alone dvd player. Vibration is annoying. Thank god for Zalman and their ilk, because once you go PVR you'll never want to go back.. ;-)

MythTV is the answer your looking for. LINK. It is a free, linux-based 'TiVo like' system with much more to offer, such as music jukebox, weather system, internet browser, dvd player, video game emulator, etc.

It has compatible for expandible tuners which allow you to record multiple shows at the time. You can also run one 'monster server' and then connect small set-top box type machines to various TV's in your house giving you one centralized location where everything can be stored.

And best of all, no monthly fees!

Here are a few data points:

• A PIII/733MHz system can encode one video stream using the MPEG-4
  codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV
  watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.
• The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost
  encode two MPEG-4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.
• A PIII/800MHz system with 512MB RAM can encode one video
  stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back
  simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.
• A dual Celeron/450MHz is able to view a 480x480 MPEG-4/3300kbps file
  created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.
• A P4 2.4GHz machine can encode two 3300Kbps 480x480 MPEG-4 files and
  simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.

Try MythTV

It can run in a distrubuted client/server configuration and is capable of recoding the files to be moved to other PCs or written to DVD or VCD.

It is a very cool peice of Open Source software, but not for the feint of heart, as it is a hefty configuration task. But if you can get it installed and running, its an awesome PVR design and implementation.

With a 300 Mhz, you won't be able to do software encoding in real time; the processor just won't be able to handle it. So you're going to need to blow ~$150 or so on a tuner card that can also do hardware encoding. Hauppage is the name I hear most in this area; take a look at their WinTV 250 or 350 cards.

As far as programs, there's MythTV, which is open source, and is supposed to work well under Mandrake, which means it should be able to work well under anything.

The other option would be Sage TV, which is not open source and costs money, and, so, I'm unfamiliar with it.

fact is, until tivo is in canada it will never take off, eh. thats because canada sets the trends. so, screw you tivo, ill use mythtv

I can now officially buy more disk storage than I can use

Then let me recommend you install MythTV. I bought an 80Gb drive from Best Buy last week (60 dollars after rebate - wow!), and it's already full.

There's also MythTV and Freevo.

Both are fairly immature, but moderately stable. MythTV in particular is feature-rich, but most of the features don't behave quite right.

I'd recommend giving them a try, and maybe contributing of any one is interested, but I don't see any OSS replacing the TiVo quite yet.

For pvr just install mythtv on your xbox running linux, done deal, no need to wait for the vaporware dreamix

For those of us who still don't have one:

PVR = Personal (Digital) Video Recorder
Tivo = Commercial PVR including special hardware and service.

You can get the same features (and more) for free (like beer) with Linux and Mythtv.

MythTv can auto-skip TV commercials if you want to invest in a PVR.

A cable box doesn't need to be open source... But, when you look at what projects like MythTV are accomplishing, you'll see that there is serious potential to offer open source next-generation PVR/iTV applications on a wide range of hardware -- something the big consumer electronics companies will probably be slow to do.

The cable companies are certainly within their rights to do whatever they want with their content. It's just a shame that it comes at the cost of consumer choice and innovation.

Chris

I hear ya. I have a DCT2000 and it's the worst piece of garbage ever made. You can make your own PVR for them though. Check out http://www.mythtv.org. Someone in the forums there figured out how to talk to a DCT2000 using the serial data port.

"if it was able to record two or more (ie, any number of) shows being broadcast simultaneously!"

AFAIK, you can do that with MythTV as long as you put two or more cards in the box (cards such as the PVR250 cards that have an MPEG2 encoder chip on it, so that it barely takes any CPU to compress).

On my MythTV box, I get an hour of recording for every 750 MB. 500GB would give me nearly a month of recording time (~667 hours).

• Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Fully automatic commercial detection/skipping

• Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Fully automatic commercial detection/skipping

Build a MythTV box... use the default MPEG-4 encoding, and you'll get an hour of recording for every GB available... you can even store to remote NFS or samba shares, distribute the recordings over your local network, and use your modded XBOX to watch Live TV (streamed over the network from the backend) or recorded shows. 500GB would give you 500 hours :)

.:diatonic:.

To me, it just seemed like a general description of the RE process that people able to RE already know. EPIA M boxes are already good for small PVR boxes using mythtv when a Hauppauge PVR card is added (and a larger power supply). If the MPEG decoder can be used, I'm sure that even the lesser models of EPIA will be able to be used.

It's not exactly unknown for a builder to BS a customer and after all, it's going to be your house, not theirs.

I strongly suspect I'm getting BS about that. I think they're afraid they'll lose out on the lucrative opportunity to install my TV and telephone outlets (which they charge a lot of $$$ for). Naturally I can run telephone over Cat5, which I didn't tell them about. For TV, I think eventually I'll simply set up a MythTV server and not worry about cable TV.

Nevertheless, they said that they'd definitely not allow me to install conduits, and if I do they'll consider my contract with them void and I'll lose the house. So I won't mess with that :)