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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.
Market this! I have the ability to make a machine for this purpose, and I know people that have done it several times over.
Why isn't there a company bold enough to at least make the hardware?
I'm sure there are legal issues but it seems like some company would have tried it by now.
Sorry, the remote is a packard bell (not much better). Its the extra tv feature that supports X-10.
If I build it myself, it won't start to think me gay (not that that's a bad thing...necessarily)
It's curious that there's no reference to Freevo.
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.
Step 1: Sell your TV
Step 2: Cancel your cable/satellite/TiVo account
Step 3: Profit!
Oh...crap. I actually have a step 2.
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Open Source Shirts
MythTV works quite a bit better than this one does. Check it out here.
Yeah, I'm tired of paying monthly fees to a company that treats its customers with respect. Screw these companies supporting Linux too. Man, when TiVo released the 3.0 version of their software with broadband support built-in I nearly puked.
If I hear another person complain about a monthly fee to TiVo, I'm gonna punch them square in the pie hole.
The recording rate of the TV capture card appears to max out at 15 frames per second. If I were intending to archive these programs forever, I'd probably invest in a better card. But for timeshifting shows like the evening news from France (for my wife) and The Red Green Show (for me), 15 fps is adequate.
15 FPS, I'd hardly call that adequate for 30 FPS NTSC television, but to each his own I suppose.
In his first article:
"I remember how the process used to go when I'd scope out solutions in the closed-source world. There would be brochures to peruse. There would be data sheets read. Maybe there would be crippleware demos to run. And then there would be a solution to buy.
Unfortunately, this takes time. Significant time. And in the Internet age, time is critical.
But in the world of open source, I had several options right on my Linux CD. I didn't have to waste time with endless marketing materials."
But you DID have to waste time compiling, testing, setting up, configuring, tweaking, this that and the other thing. I mean c'mon. I've seen (and used) several proprietary solutions that work great with *uncrippled* time-trial demos.
And then you had to waste the time searching for compatible hardware, testing that, taking it back to the store, arguing for a refund, paying 15% restocking, trying something else, etc, etc.
And then you get to the box itself. I'm sorry but a Celeron 400? Sure it might 'work', but not all that well. My p3 600 had trouble capturing tv quality streams without siginificant losses. And it at least had the benefit of UDMA/100 and a 133mhz FSB.
Meh, so some guy made a shitty (functionally and aesthetically) PC that runs linux and plugged it into his TV. Kudo's to you, sir.
I'd really like to do something like this, and use linux to do it. But this guy is full of it. I hate when zealots pretend to be informative.
Gimme a useful article, not a thinly veiled 'MS is TeH SUCK Liniz is tEH GODE!' troll.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
DirecTivo is the best... it has a satellite decoder built right in... now show me how to build one of those, and I'll be impressed... but until then, I can't easily change channels on my sat reciever with my pc, and I don't feel like forking out huge amounts of money for two tv tuner cards and two sat receivers just so I can watch one channel and record another...
Tivo still has a place in the market... shrinking yes, but it's not cost effective to try and replace it's functionality... at least not yet...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Bullshit! Apparently he doesn't have a wife that feels the need to carry on a conversation right in the middle of a critical part of the show. ;-)
and likewise, the rewind feature comes in handy so you can reply what you just missed when the "conversation" started, before you could pause
Use vcr
/dev/video
Here are my settings: (works very well)
[defaults]
quality = 100
keyframes = 15
audiobitrate = 128
framerate = 29.97
audiomode = stereo
resolution = 384x288
codec = DivX 4.0
norm = NTSC
source = Television
grabdevice =
freqtab = us-cable
Ahhh, the TiVo faithful... possibly a group actually MORE ravenous about a product than Mac users. I should know, I'm both!
Don't Tivo and Replay have patents on the concept of DVR? It may even be illegal for him to overspend for shoddy substitute.
On the plus side... I have fun playing with my toys too.
It may be nice to have a box and software that *potentially* can work like a Tivo... for the Linux gods. But I have to ask in the name of all the rest of the mortals, where's the GUI? Can we just set this up ONCE and then avoid any kind of hacking? Or is this flawed with the problem of many OSS packages, lack of usability for those who doesn't want/are not able to bother?
IMHO this is the main reason why OSS has not skyrocketed yet, because many people would prefer to pay an extra $100 than having to write batches every time you want to record a TV show or any other kind of menial task.
I know instances of OSS with good interfaces exist. But GUI usually seems to have a very low priority, unfortunately.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Well, it does show what you can expect to pay if you wanted to do this all on your own. Also,adding a vastly larger hard drive doesn't come with any extra risks like voiding warranty. You might even have all the hardware already laying around and just put it to good use.
It also shows exactly how competitive TiVo really is. Basically you can build something for about the same price as a TiVo,even if it isn't quite as nice as a TiVo. If you invest in your TiVo and buy a lifetime membership you get something vastly better that will have a good resale value a year or 2 from now.
Just listen to TiVo owners. You will rarely hear people who are so happy with a piece of consumer hardware as people are with TiVo. I love my TiVo (Almost 3 years now) and so does every person I know who has ever used it for any length of time. If you are at all interested in something like this at least try a TiVo out.
Building a home system might be loads of fun and you might be able to do a few things you can't with a consumer product but people love TiVo for a reason. Find out why.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
While the main appeal to most people to purchase a TiVo is its timeshifting ability, there is far more to its featureset than just the way it pauses live TV. Anyone who thinks that TiVo is just a digital VCR hasn't really looked at one closely enough to understand the flexibility that it grants you.
"And I don't like the concept of having my destiny linked with the fortunes of the supplying company. I don't need a US$300 doorstop if the TiVo company should someday fail. Hey, if Enron and Worldcom can end up in the toilet, you have to allow for the fact that no one company will be around forever."
I think TiVo has stated that should they go under, they'd supply the current users with some facility to allow the units to continue to function.
"It should also be capable of creating images that can be burned on Video CDs (VCD)."
This is an ability I know someone has hacked into their TiVo. In addition, the new version of WinDVD allows you to view a stream at 1.2x the speed of broadcast, letting you shave down a 60 minute program to 30 minutes or so (after eliminating commercials).
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Plus it's progressive scan, so actually losing 75% of the original 60 frame interlaced NTSC source. This system was definitely designed by a computer guy, not a video guy (as honorable and deep a form of geekhood as any).
:).
He really wants something that can do interlaced capture, like MPEG-2 or some of the higher profile versions of MPEG-4. I believe this is supported in the current CVS of Xvid, at least experimentally. MPEG-4 would give a LOT smaller file sizes than MPEG-2 at the same quality.
Or, since VCD is his goal, he could capture straight to ffmpeg in a VCD compatible profile. Or use SVCD MPEG-2, which would be higher quality, and could still fit a half-hour show on a 800 MB CD-ROM.
Windows Media 9 has great, free, integrated capture that can do interlaced, but that'd be hardly Linux friendly
My video compression blog
This guy watches Red Green. I was shocked to see that none of the pics on his site had a stitch of duct tape.
I don't have any problems getting 30fps, but I am using 1Ghz Athlon for my home made PVR. I have experimented with this a bit, for me, 15fps doesn't cut it, 24-25 is exceptable, but for truly smooth video that isn't hard to watch, I need to hit 30fps.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
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Man builds house by pushing large stones into a big pile.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Sure you say you can do a Tivo cheaper. Maybe. But to me, the advantages of doing this outweigh the advantages of Tivo. I personally don't care for the thumbs uping and thumbs downing. I know what I want to watch and I don't want it recording anything else. Couple other folks mentioned the Freevo project and that interests me alot. But a lot of folks forget what you could do. You could hack the program a bit and add a button that lets you Zap a show to a standard DVD-R. You could use NFS and make a similar pc with a WiFi card in it, but minimal hard drive and a TV out card and have the view your recorded shows on any tv. Or start watching it in the living room, pause and go to the bedroom to finish. You could run samba and then mount a disc and setup a doze machine for your kids and they can watch Seasame Street in their room (no TV needed). I could go on, but I would have a rather long post. The advantages far outweigh they nice package Tivo provides.
Gorkman
So what % of TiVo sales goes to GNU/Linux? Or is Tivo just riding on Linux's back?
Why should any of it? Isn't the point that they should be putting the source back out for people to benefit from? And if they are doing this, aren't they fulfilling the gpl and any requirements and/or obligations they have to the OS community?
Ah, but in fact 29.97 is an approximation itself. The actual value is 30000/1001.
:).
As long as we're being geeky
My video compression blog
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).
He goes through all the trouble and expense to make a basic TV "Time Shift" device with Linux, and then sumbits a picture of it sitting on top of a VCR!!! Granted, that's old tech "time shifting", but he obviously knows how to set the clock on the damn thing, so it probably could "work just fine for his needs" as well.
Let's see, what else could we make with Linux to do the same job as a tool we already have?
Wine, music and cinema are the three great creations of humanity. -T'Ian Han
It seems like the real voodoo cool trick that is unavailable on any of these systems and is available on Tivo and ReplayTV is the ability to pause live TV. Personally I think that's one of the best features of the system. Actually, pausing live TV isn't the cool part, it's letting a show queue up all the commercial time at the beginning, while you do something else, then go in and skip all the commercials. I'd love to flip a recorder on for the first 90 minutes of monday night football, then go do something else, and come back to a commercial free game.
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The thing is that it is much easier to sit down and do a CLI quickly and get the kinks worked out than it is to develop a usable GUI. I've tried to do a similar project to this, and doing it all command line makes life much simpler in the beginning. Eventually, yes, having a nice GUI would be good, but if a hacker can throw together the box with a CLI and be happy with what he's got, isn't that okay?
If somebody wants a nice GUI, they'll write one. As somebody else pointed out, there's the freevo project which has what appears to be a very nice GUI.
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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
DirecTivo units, as well as MS's UlitmateTV, can do this now. The disadvantage with the former is that DirecTV is required. I'm not sure about UltimateTV, because, really, I'd rather not...
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
"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
the company with the worst pop-up/under ads ever
Just as MP3.com is only one vendor of MPEG audio files, X10.com is only one vendor of devices that follow the X-10 power-line data communication protocol.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
This TV-Now thing looks to be a better bet. It's not free but that (to me) is not a bad thing--you'll have somebody to complain to if it doesn't work or the listings are incorrect.
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.
Instant TiVO.... Oh wait, for Linux .....
Try, http://gatos.sourceforge.net/ or ftp://ftp.xig.com/pub/3Ddemos/extras/README.xvamp
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
What's wrong with you people? For years, everyone whined that Linux was being ignored in the server market, in the embedded market, etc.
Suddenly, a few years ago, TiVo produced a Linux-based PVR. They even (*GASP!*) encouraged hacking it!
Now, you want to "avoid the service cost?"
Brilliant. Take one of the few companies that stands to actually make a successful business based on Linux, and attempt to put them out of business because you're too cheap to pay $12 a month for the service, to support a company that has supported the Linux community over the years.
What, exactly, is the reason for not wanting to support TiVo? Besides being complete skinflints, that is...if you can't afford $12/mo., you shouldn't be spending $300-500 for a luxury item like a PVR in the first place.
.@.
http://freevo.sourceforge.net
EXCELENT PVR software, i've used it. Actually, i haven't tried the recording part, but everything i have tried (playing movies, mp3s, photo gallery) was worked great. Has an awsome interface too. It would be GREAT for one of those anandtec boxes.... the sv24 or whatever it is.
I'm not drunk, I'm just in touch with pi.
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 ?
I see many posts here complaining about this guy's home made PVR. They are all complaining about the lack of features or this and that. It's a work in progress folks and it's just been started! Grow up!
I wonder if these same complainers were complaining in 1993 about Linux kernel 0.9x "Microsoft has more features!" "Microsoft has a better GUI!" "Why should we spend all the time configuring this Linux thing when we could just spend $300 and buy Windows".
The arguments are identical. Cut this fellow some slack for daring to build something that you won't even attempt.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.