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Build Your Own Linux PVR
linuxwrangler writes "A few weeks ago Russell Pavlicek, Infoworld's 'Open Source' columnist mentioned a personal linux video time-shifter (PVR) he built. In response to reader requests he has now posted a page describing the project." Escaping the monthly fees of TiVo is a good motivation -- and the total cost here isn't bad either.
After all, if one person posts the times of the programs that they want to record, then everyone can have automated recording like Tivo.
Any volunteers for this open source database?
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
So, for $100 more than the cost of a TiVo, which are now at $199 with a $50 rebate, he built a box that has 5 hours less recording time, a worse encoder,a fraction of the features, and how do you even begin to discribe the UI? Non-existant? I will stick to my TiVos.
I always wonder that all that gets talked about is the Tivo. Im in Europe and there are many different PVRs avaialable here form small and big companies like Toshiba, Nokia, Panasonic and the like. Building one yourself is cool i bet but there are also many different harddrive based video recorders with timeshifting available. And no annoying subscription or anything like that.
Ive seen some good mods of VCR's, but they all seem to make some pretty nasty compromises.
Any ideas?
I call it my "tuxvo"
If you combine cron with vcr you can achieve good quality recordings using divx4/5 pretty much off the shelf.
Add an nVidia GeForce 2 MX w/TV-out and nVidia's kernel module you can save yourself the money for the scan converter.
That is, if you don't mind black bars at the edge of the screen. Otherwise go with the scan converter.
But IMHO nothing beats MPlayer for playback. YMMV
Oh and In Soviet Russia tuxvo records you.
I just got Tivo, and while I'm not a huge fan of the fee (I went box lifetime subscription), you have to remember that with the fee you get software updates and fixes and a really good, highly detailed program guide.
Tivos feature set goes well beyond just recording Sopranos on Sunday nights at 8PM.
I'm not saying an HDD-based VCR wouldn't be a good thing, I wouldn't mind having one, but don't compare it to Tivo -- it's not the same.
With all these homegrown tivo like PVR's is that if you have digital cable or a satellite you are going to miss out on recording a ton of stuff. With satellite at least you can get a box with the decoders built in. For cable I just recently got the new Scientific Atlanta 8000 box for time warner and it works pretty well, but it is Tivo-lite and has some problems sometimes. But its still WAY better than using a VCR. All it needs is a network jack so I can get 2 boxes and share their recordings. Oh it doesn't do hdtv either.
Seems the missing piece in all this is supported MPEG-2 encoding hardware. Then one could use a really low-power (read: quiet) CPU to run it all.
Are there any cards out there worth looking at?
My setup consists of a desktop machine and two laptops, all with 802.11b cards. The desktop machine has the A->D card and big disk. One laptop has a tv-out and sits on the VCR for playback. The other laptop is the "remote" (I ssh into the player laptop and issue commands).
From my figuring, the author spent $300 building this super-widget. So, he saved $250 over a new TiVo with a lifetime suibscription.
:)
For that, he sacrificed a whole lot!
* 15fps
* poor video quality (vertical lines) on top of the 15fps
* No 'live pause'
* No watching one program while saving another
* No guide, etc.
For me, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Even if TiVo fails as a company, I suspect that the community will come up with a network-hack for getting scheduling information.
And even if you lose that, you still have a better-quality recorder with an easy interface, more features, that's running linux.
It only compares if you wanted to play around building a PVR for personal humor. It doesn't make sense as a solution, though
Steve
So if you can't really use a TiVO without a subscription, all this BS from people saying this build-your-own PVR is no good is just that, total BS, FUD. It makes you wonder if these comments were actually posted BY Tivo.
I would love to purchase or build a PVR. But I have absolutely no interest in adding to my monthly bills. That seems to me what the whole point of this discussion. All these comments saying it isnt as good as TiVO are totally off-topic and are just clogging up the discussion.
"This guy isn't doing anything that deserves a slashdot article."
Actually, there's one key item which piques my interest: the ability to record to VCD.
While I've seen others hack their way into this ability on their TiVos, if enough users/enthusiasts clamor for this kind of functionality, TiVo/Replay may add USB CD-R/DVD.R support to future revisions.
Given the television and film industries' general aversion to digital reproduction, however, should TiVo/Replay provide this support, it might behoove them to placate Hollywood by specifically coding the functionality to keep the commercials with the shows.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
I can't believe that this made /. only 15fps recording wtf?
:) My computer can do a great job at it (ie 25fps on PAL), granted it is a 1800xp - but my setup also has to invert the colors to decrypt the cable tv I watch :)
Where is the real time mpeg4 encoding? thats what you want - why implement a tv recorder on something that doesn't have the grunt to pull it off and paint it as being a great achievement?
Hint - Record using either transcode or mencoder for real time mpeg4 encoding
Need a remote control? - check out lirc - costs about $10 to make a simple serial adapter that can use 95% of generic remote controls.
Rock and roll fantasy.
I've been working on a PC-based Tivo-like system for a couple of months now and have published some (hopefully) useful information here.
One critical factor is the choice of a "smart" or a "dumb" capture card and deciding whether you want to be able to export your recordings to DVDR/CDR disks in DVD/SVCD/VCD format.
If you just want plain Tivo-like functionality then you can use DivX as your compression method and get reasonable results with a software-based realtime encoder.
I've compared the two options and reviewed the Pinnacle PCTV card (dumb BT8x8 capture) and the Hauppauge PVR-250 (smart -- it has onbard hardware MPEG encoding).
Is this stuff any good? Here's a clue -- hardware companies should stick to making hardware and leave the software writing to software professionals. This clearly hasn't happened in the tuner/capture-card industry.
Most of the work to date has been done under Windows but I'm currently working on using this hardware config under Linux and will update the project site accordingly.
However, if you want to then export your DivX files to DVD/SVCD/VCD you're going to get sub-optimal quality because you're transcoding between two lossy formats. Since the stuff I like to keep for posterity on CDR/DVDR is more than likely going to be material like good movies or music concerts, I have opted to use an MPEG1/MPEG2 encoder and avoid re-encoding.
There are also a couple of video samples demonstrating the differences between the three most popular options:
1. Realtime MPEG capture using a dumb card
2. Non-realtime encoding using TMPGenc
3. Realtime MPEG capture using a hardware encoder.
There's a heap more to do on this project but it's coming along quite nicely.
I tried Tivo - it sucked. The Tivo couldn't change the channel on my DirectTv receivers (RCA). I still like the PVR concept and was thinking of trying to get it working using freevo and DirecTv. Has anyone else tried this combonaition (I haven't seen any posts on the web concerning this combonation.) Thanks - Tony
All you MandrakeClub members who are interested in Freevo and MythTV need to head over to the RPM-voting section of the Club and vote for Freevo and MythTV.
o ad &name=RPM
http://www.mandrakeclub.com/modules.php?op=modl
Freevo is on the first page, and Myth TV is on the 3rd.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
The networks just don't "get it" yet.
The big thing that PVRs change is the whole "must see" lineup. You're no longer tied to your couch because favorite show is one right now. This puts a big crimp in the way Networks are used to thinking in, since using a PVR means you may not watch their Thursday night line up until Sunday morning.
PVRs also threaten the whole "lead-in" concept where they'll put a not-so popular show between two popular programs in hopes that you won't switch away. Since PVRs only record what you tell them to, you won't be recording those extra programs anyways.
Worse still, since many cable programs re-run at later times/dates, using a PVR means you'll actually be able to watch *more* TV that you're actually interested in.
It's too bad the Nielsens don't take PVRs into account otherwise the Networks would learn that is actually a good thing... They no longer have to just fight for your eyeballs between 8-10pm when all they have to do is rerun their programs at 2am, and folks will record them. (IE - there's no reason to go off-air...)
I went with the VIA EPIA 800, which features an 800 MHz VIA C3 CPU with on-board TV-out (and much more) for a mere US$120. And it's tiny for a full-featured computer, just 170mm x 170mm.
Plus, it has built-in audio, on-board Ethernet (though I've plugged in a wireless PCI card), USB, etc. -- great for a project like this. And it runs GNU/Linux like a champ.
I put it in a US$90 black mini-ITX case so it doesn't look like a computer -- it looks like an A/V component, fitting right in with the VCR and the cable box.
Finally, it runs very cool and very quiet (or it will once I remove the noisy hard disk and make it boot off the network instead) -- just one small CPU fan required. The CPU isn't that powerful -- mostly around the speed of a 600MHz Celeron, and the FPU is a little weaker than that -- but it's plenty of power for me.
There's a lot more info about this and similar hardware at mini-itx.com. I think a big market is developing around these little boxes.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
I wish Tivo would advertise that fact a bit more. I had forgotten about that little bit of information over the last several months. I might have given them a bit more consideration for the purchase.
You can go ahead and call me a nutcase... I've been called worse.
The three things that really sold me on the Replay were the broadband connection, the web scheduling, and the program sharing. Again, Tivo might have been higher in the running if I had known about the $10 USB to Ethernet option.
I put off buying a PVR for a while just so I could get the broadband connection. My TV is in a bad location for running an extra phone jack, but is in a good location for running a connection to my network. The phone lines in my house are marginal at best, and a modem quality powerline phone jack would cost about $90. Since Tivo didn't support broadband "out of the box", the advantage swung to Replay.
The Replay web scheduling is very nice, but lacks a couple of features I want. Like Tivo, the Replay only connects to the schedule servers once a day. As a result, if I use myReplayTV.com to change my unit's settings, it doesn't take effect until the next day, after the nightly schedule sync. I would prefer a 'push' system. I could open a restricted port in my firewall and myReplayTV.com could use it to push my changes to my ReplayTV unit. You have to do something similar to set up external program sharing with other ReplayTV units, so I don't see that it would be a big problem for SonicBlue to implement this feature.
I have had my ReplayTV about a week. So far, I have enjoyed it a great deal. I imagine if I had decided on a Tivo instead, I would feel similarly.
Cheers,
I.V.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
It would be very useful to be able to control all the stuff that currently has a remote, from a computer.
is one that I am currently experimenting with: Allwell Set-Top Boxes.
I bought one through my employer, and the cool things about these boxes are:
Can be seen here.
Only problem is the display driver, the video chip is a Tvia 5005 and so far I had no succes in finding drivers for Linux... VESA FB works well but it could be much faster/smoother/use real PAL resolutions if I had the correct drivers. If anyone knows where to get them, please tell me !
Sound works fine BTW, but I don't remember what chip that was... CX5530 ?