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Turning the PC into a Digital Video Recorder
gearfix2 writes "The NYTimes ran this story in today's paper about how to turn the PC into a personal video recorder (a la TiVo)... It's got pretty thorough coverage of PC-based hardware with the conclusion "the TiVo outshines the PC-based systems by being easier to use and by offering more built-in intelligence." Conspicuously absent are El Gato's EyeTV for the mac and SnapStream's Personal Video Station... Anyways, the real question is whether PC PVR will *ever* get there. No one does it quite right yet..."
There is a fairly neat open source PVR at mythtv.org. It is still rather early in development, but has neat features like an on-screen display, a program guide, pausing and rewinding of live TV, etc. Pretty neat stuff.
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Works for me as a member login.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Hauppauge has a new card that I've been looking into, and the Navis-Pro is also supposed to be good.
Similar cards were in the thousands of dollars a couple years ago. Now they're around $200... and falling. We're not long before its very easy, very good quality, and very inexpensive. We're not quite there yet though, and for now TiVo and the like and certainly the way to go.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Check out MythTV, from the author of Freeamp. It uses Linux, Qt, and a TV tuner card to provide an entire solution for dropping a box next to your TV. Here are a few features:
Other things such as support for various emulators are on the todo list. The frontend is rather pretty as well.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/
How about this?
The direcTivo just extracts the mpeg stream directly from the sattelite signal, it has no mpeg encoder in the box. Thus its cheap enough to put in 2 recorders because they just dump the stream to disk.
The standalone tivo on the otherhand has a chip for doing mpeg encoding in realtime. It can only process 1 stream at a time. I guess its a price/value call for the tivo company not to include 2 of these in the box.
The one thing I like most about the tivo vs a PC based solution is that the tivo is a sexy little box that does its 1 job very very well. I don't want to have 2 pc's to do that same job. The only big advantage to me for the PC based solution is the fact that it would be far easier to archive the video that I capture.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I ditched my vcr months ago. Just get a tv capture card with the bttv848 chip for video in [I recommend the winTV-FM, as it also has a stereo decoder and sound capture dsp on the card, leaving your existing sound card free, about $50 street]
Then, all you need is a good audio sync maintaining capture program like NewVideoRecorder and a good MP4 codec, and you're set! Oh, you probably need a least an athlon 1800 or equivilant, to do realtime 640x480 encoding capture with good deinterlacing. Much weaker systems can easily handle 320x240, which isn't much worse than vhs. Add in a few 80gig drives, a fast CDR, and you've got entertainment bliss.
Did I mention that the hauppage card comes with a remote, and it too is supported. So, sit back on the couch, with the computer hooked up to both record and play to your big screen tv, easily controlled by a remote.
It's being done right now, today, on peoples linux boxes. I've been doing it for over 4 months!
The only bad thing is that, currently, I still find the best application for editing commercials out of shows I want to archive, to be virtualdub [a win32 app]. It runs under wine, sure, but it still kind of hurts to have to do it. At least it's GPLd, though.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.