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Building A Low-Budget TiVo Substitute?
thepuma writes "Since I'm cheap, and don't want to pay monthly fees to Tivo, I am researching building my own low-budget Personal Video Recorder and player. Free software options include Freevo and MythTV. Hardware options are the main cost factor. How would you go about building the perfect low-budget PVR?" We've looked at similar questions before, but the guts of such a system (both hardware and software) have been improving -- MythTV, for instance, now supports Hauppauge's PVR-350 card. How would you build a system like this now?
and some tapes.
Don't they call those a VCR?
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Mom, can you tape the Simpsons? Mom, can you tape the Simpsons?
actually what tivo is doing is going after folks who "distribute" images of a tivo drive to others. You're free to hack away at your own tivo, including making drive images. *Distributing* tivo drive images violates Tivo's copyrights to their software, and also it violates linux's copyrights, because you're distributing a binary of linux without the corresponding source. Nevermind all of the other GPL programs that go with the full "gnu+linux" based OS that runs on Tivos.
Frankly, Tivo is a company that has shown a very cooperative corporate attitude towards tivo owners and hacking. They recognize that a tivo hacker is a tivo owner and a tivo owner is a tivo customer. What kind of bass-ackwards company would try to prevent their own customers from excercising fair-use with legally purchased products... oh nevermind.
I recently managed to compress an episode of Survivor down to 5 bytes with no noticeable loss in quality!
...
Going by that, I'd say he'd get quite a bit on that drive
And you can record 60 hours of "Searching for signal" thanks to the rain fade.
word.
Good god man! For $700 you could have hired illegal immigrants to swap video tapes for you, clean your pool, and take care of the yard. Or you could have just bought a Tivo Series 2 with a lifetime subscription.
'Same speed C but faster'
No doubt the techno-geek-hobbyist in us all longs for a custom, home-grown PVR, but the reason I haven't gone the "roll-your-own" route yet is simple: The "Wife Factor". Plain and simple, the absolute LAST thing I need to deal with is my wife trying to get a less-than-100%-stable system to work.
[Obligatory_ReplayTV_comment]Our ReplayTV systems have been very stable and reliable. They are basically "appliances" that simply work. No muss, no fuss. And the wife is very happy with them.[/Obligatory_ReplayTV_comment]
Trust me, after you've heard the line "So, how do I turn on the TV?" coming from a very pissed-off wife, you won't regret your buying decision...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
At least the pubes are blurred out, in order to prevent the image from being obscene.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Not so cheap now, eh?
Indeed. It looks like there's real competition to the Goat-Ass now. This is one challenge that I hope to never spectate again, but this is slashdot where our motto is: "if we can't put our heads in our own asses, we'll trick you into looking at some nasty pictures of other asses". To the parent post: Google is not evil. You sir, are evil and that woman is not at all healthy. *shiver*
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
"Lifetime sub $300-$400"
Lifetime of the UNIT, not YOU.
So that's worth far less than you think.