Slashdot Mirror
Home-Grown TiVo Stories?
PolyDwarf writes "I'm in the process of figuring out how I'm going to build a homegrown TiVo machine (i.e. a computer sitting next to or in my home electronics stack).
My question for is "What's worked best for you?" Most solutions I've researched are great if you have regular cable. However, satellite systems and digital cable boxes seem to present a special challenge, in that the software on the PC needs to know about an IR connector that is then hooked up to the front of the digital cable/satellite box.
Who has done a solution like what I'm researching? What cases/processors/memory/TV Card/IR transceiver/OS/software/etc worked out for you? Did the end result justify the pain and hassle?"
Freevo and linux have been working pretty well for me. Just setup xmltv and go.
A great place to look for small form factor machines is over at mini-itx.com, great small form factor stuff. For software, freshmeat.net and a bit of scripting is your friend :D
mythtv.org looks promissing, version 0.8 works well, dunno about the receiver stuff as I just have cable.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s= &forumid=26
They'll be your friend.
Regular cable is best, just because of TV tuner cards.
Also check out http://www.mythtv.com if you want to go the linux route.
I have an old Celeron 433 with an STB TVPCI (BT848 chipset). For software I'm running IULabs IUVCR (their site seems to be down) which changes the channel and sets all the encoding options. Everything captures to AVI, which I then play on that computer or any other on the network (nothing has TV out yet)
For scheduling everything is run through the MS Task Scheduler and is under manual control.
Travis
The MythTV Project is what you want. As often noted on Slashdot, it does nearly everything that TiVo does, and a heapload more. It's open source, and under active development ... however, it's not quite at full functionality. The most recent stable release is version 0.8 and while not without some bugs seems to work quite nicely. I've paired it with a AVerTV Studio TV capture card, a Shuttle FV25 mainboard, and a Celeron 1.4 GHz processor. To my understanding, MythTV supports external tuner devices such as satellite systems. Installation/construction is straightforward but not for the faint of heart. Some RPMs exist for certain required components, but much of installation involves the "./configure; make; su; make install" cycle.
IF -- and this is a strong supposition -- you either have spare hardware laying around that's pretty strong (eg, in the GHz range rather than 100s of MHz) or have a weird bent on building your own systems, then by all means roll up your sleeves and dig in! However, if you are looking for the least expensive or easiest alternative, then buy a used or refurbished TiVo.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
My question for [you] is[,] "What's worked best for you?"
Tivo
Yup, don't go the homebrew route if you want to save money and have a robust, simple, solution. I'm in the process of building a freevo/mythtv box. It's a lot of work to get the drivers working, I'm getting poor performance with an AMD 1.4GHz machine, and the software is not ready for prime time. The remote control that comes with the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 is a little flakey - it works, but not all the buttons are functional under Linux. Overall it's just one big expensive pain in the butt.
There are only a few reasons that you might really want to go this route:
1) you already have the spare parts you need
2) you live outside the US where Tivo is unavailable
3) you like spending lots of time getting stuff to work in Linux
4) you absolutely need the extra functionality that Tivo does not give (DVD burning, network capability etc.)
Otherwise, Tivo with the unlimited subscription is cheaper and less hassle.
seems like one good way to cut the noise and design a scalable system is to provide independent frontend and backend systems. I know mythtv does this. This way you can run a "server" that can do all your recordings and store all your media and be as loud as it wants since it will be anywhere in your house on a network. Then you can attach any number of frontend clients to tvs or monitors ... and those can be hacked down mini boxes of all sorts. To keep the noise down you wouldn't use HDD's or many fans, you would just netboot or boot from cd or floppy. There are also some using XBox as a frontend as well. Pretty nifty if you ask me.
It took me at most an hour to hack up a script to record using Ruby and mp1e from RTE. Here it is, and here's a sample listing. Real hard. Not. It finds dupes, conflicts, and can easily support multiple cards just by running multiple instances.
Granted, it doesn't track showtime changes, and it's not fancy at all. But it gets the job done, it was easy to write, it's easy to modify, and it's been recording all the TV I watch for the past few months without a hitch. It cost me an hour of my time.
Why would I want to do that? TiVo isn't exactly a "nice" company, either. It might be one thing if these came with open specs for modification, pulling the files off and burning them, and modifying the source to do what I want. But they don't. And they won't.
How could you forget MythTV, particularly when Freevo is just a ripoff of MythTV source?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Compare my box to the price of a TiVo. From Amazon.com: TiVo Series2 80 Hour Digital Video Recorder - $399 - $50 rebate = $350. (I couldn't find the price of a 120 hour TiVo, so I'll give TiVo a little advantage)
Okay, now add the lifetime service fee of $299. Now you're up to $650. Wow look, all of a suddenmy box is cheaper! Or maybe you just want to add two years of service. Well then $12.95/month * 24 months of service fee - oops that's more than the lifetime fee!
But guess what: my box can also play video games, and MP3s. I can get TV shows OFF of it onto other media. It can be a webserver, file server, whatever else I want it to be. It stores my MP3s and can play them. Guess which one's a better deal?
And oops, I forgot to include the Home Media Option which lets you have the webserver capability, that's an additional $99. So the real TiVo is up to $749. Yet, that comes for free with a custom built one.
So the TiVo costs more than $100 more than my box, yet my custom built box does more and won't stop working when TiVo goes out of business.
Just to correct/clarify a few of your points...