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Build Your Own Linux PVR

Posted by timothy on from the 15-fps-could-be-improved dept.

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.

10 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Open PVR just needs an open schedule... by Helpadingoatemybaby · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Now if someone can build an "open" free web based schedule of the major networks that people can contribute to, then the PVR would be able to read this off the net and schedule recordings!

    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.

    1. Re:Open PVR just needs an open schedule... by Mr.+Sketch · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You could just use tv.yahoo.com.

      It couldn't be too difficult to figure out their URL parsing and get the provider number. You basically just get a table of shows, and you could even bring up descriptions of the shows, from the links on the page.

      The basic format is:
      http://tv.yahoo.com/grid?lineup=us_CO05536&al l=1&s tartdate=1039046400&starthour=18

      You can get the lineup code from:
      http://tv.yahoo.com/lineup?co=us&zip=80027
      And substitute your zip.

      startdate is kinda tricky. I haven't looked at it long enough to decode it, but just off-hand, it looks like the number of minutes since midnight Jan 1, 1970. (The example I pasted in was for Wednesday December 4th, 2002).

      starthour is just the 24 hour time to start the listing. So my pasted example was for 6pm.

      There are also some other options, but they are optional for the U.S.

      --
      Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
    2. Re:Open PVR just needs an open schedule... by nautical9 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      You're right, it is a problem - I built my own web-based TV listings page using XMLTV (just for where I live), but put it online. It didn't take zap2it.com (the North American provider that XMLTV scrapes from, not TVguide) long to find it and ban my IP.

      However, XMLTV's message boards on SourceForge claim that zap2it's license agreement DOES allow for all sorts of personal use (just not public, like I did). But I'm sure as XMLTV's popularity grows, they'll start cracking down on its usage.

      FYI, the tv_grab_na script hits their server once per day per channel - so if you want 14 days of programming, and have 50 channels, that's 700 rather-large, dynamic, HTML-ridden pages they have to serve - if a few thousand start doing this daily, they'll figure a way to shut it down in a hurry.

      I do wish the TV stations would provide their own XML-based listings (SOAP?) - it'd certainly be in their best interests.

  2. The User Interface, or lack there of... by John_McKee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The User Interface, or lack there of... by zsmooth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I believe replacing the hard drive in TiVo is difficult and expensive...

      Difficult? Absolutely not, especially for the types that hang out here.

      Expensive? No more expensive than upgrading the hard drive in your custom box. This week I'm quadrupling the size of my $200 40hr Tivo with a $100 120GB samsung drive (5400 is better for the tivo, as it runs cooler and quieter, and a faster spindle speed gives no advantage).

      I experimented for a long time with building a custom PVR, but now that I finally have a Tivo, I have no idea what took me so long. It seriously is awesome.

    2. Re:The User Interface, or lack there of... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Obviously the linux box isn't a shrinkwrapped solution. But the homebrew might be more fun.

      I just finshed a program to grab yahoo.com tv listings and rank the shows, using a bayesian network on a training set of previously watched programs. (The show's title, rating, stars, genre etc are used for scoring, not its actual content.) Fun stuff! But obviously not yet a consumer product like TiVo.

  3. Been doing this for just over a year..... by Fapestniegd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Tivo vs. HDD-based VCR by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. For 60% of the cost you get 33% the result! by 71thumper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  6. Here's another Tivo-like PC project site by NewtonsLaw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.