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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?
I use myth (mainly because it supports live tv while freevo doesn't.) It's a decent program, but still somewhat buggy. I find it crashes on occasion, and compiling can be a nightmare at times. With a fast processor (I have an Athlon XP1800) you can easily encode and decode without having to use a hardware mpeg card. The setup process is somewhat painful, and sometimes confusing. I think Myth is great for a DIY'er, but not ready for a consumer solution.
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
...has a great article on just this subject.
...I just came for the free beer.
TV Cards
Pretty helpful site for beginners.
Actually you probably can not get much cheaper than DirecTivo.
If you are a new sub. you can get the DirecTivo for about $50, and with a DirecTivo you only pay $4.99/month for the Tivo service (and that is for the account not the number of boxes). For me in my area DirecTV is MUCH cheaper than cable. Also the quality of a DirecTivo is far superior than any other option available for non-HDTV PVRs. It records the direct MPEG stream no encoded done on the box. Also the DirecTivo can record 2 shows at a time!
Course if you want to do it yourself you can and it would be fun, however it would most likely not be as stable, quality not as good. And you probably wont save much money if you already have cable or directv.
I use mythtv, I have 1 backend server with a Hauppauge pvr-250 and a OLD win-tv card in it, it has 1GB of ram, 3x120GB harddisks, and an amd2500+. The two cards allow me to record two shows at once, lets two people on two different frontends watch two different channels, or picture in picture. This computer has more power than mythtv needs, you can use something with alot less power. Especally if you get a hardware tv capture card.
When I am recording off my old win-tv capture card and I am in gnome running mozilla, etc. I can tell a big difference in video quality as when I am not doing anything on the computer. So if you have a slow computer, you want to use X/mozilla/etc, or just want better video quallity get a hardware video capture card (happauge pvr 250/350). A pII 400mhz would do very very well with a pvr 250/350.
My main frontend is a Xbox with gentoo installed. If you have a Xbox and you are as disappointed as I was with the games the xbox is your best bet for a front end for a TV. It "fits" beside the tv, I mean who wants a tower computer beside the tv anyways? Also some guy made a xbox-linux/mythtv distro. I haven't tried it but it looks really neat.
My other front end is a laptop with 802.11g card in it. I must say mythtv does QUITE well wireless.
Sure they do. I am using this functionality on my MythTV box right now.
When MythTV wants to change channel on the cable box, it calls a user-definable external script. I use LIRC to emit the IR control codes to switch channels on my General Instruments cable box.
If you add all the hardware costs up, you'll pay close to (or more than) the $250 it takes to get a tivo. Then you'll need to find some way to get program listings if you want to schedule recordings based on something besides just channel & date & time.
And the bottom line is, you don't have to pay tivo a monthly anything. Just buy the tivo and don't subscribe to the listings. Or you can buy the lifetime and not deal with monthly payments. Or buy a used tivo(with lifetime service) on ebay and get a deal. Lots of folks are trading up to series2 this way.
I have to admit that the series2 with home media is awesome. Get a $30 usb nic, and you can stream images/audio from the network. There's a sweet *nix program called byrequest (http://sourceforge.net/projects/byrequest/) that lets you serve files without windows, and they claim is will serve video also...
So why don't you go put that in your pipe and... nevermind.
- CPU: Athlon XP 2400
- MB: Some random Gigabyte motherboard, about $60
- Case: I splurged here and got an HTPC-looking Cooler Master ATC-610
- Video: GeForce2 MX 440
- Capture: Hauppage WinTV PVR 250
- 120MB IDE HD
- 802.11 wireless card
- DVD-ROM/CDRW drive
In total, I spent around $700. This is clearly not cheap compared to a TiVo, but I can do a lot of things that a typical TiVo can't and I don't have any service fees to pay. If I really wanted to save money, here's what I would have done:To be really useful, a homemade pvr has to solve the problem of obtaining program listings.
May I direct your attention to this.
This is currently what MythTV uses.
Regards
elFarto
Lifetime subs are 300 now.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
It took a bit of work to get going, and I probably spent a total of about $500-$600.
BUT!
There is no subscription fee - TV listings are downloaded via XMLTV.
I can store CDs and DVDs on the HD.
I can run multiple front-ends, enabling me to watch TV/recordings on another machine on the network.
I can update recording settings through a very friendly HTTP interface.
I can extract and re-encode recorded shows.
In addition, people have written lots of groovy addons, including:
A MAME frontend
A CallerID module (when the phone rings, callerid information is displayed onscreen!)
A weather report module
The possibilities are endless.
Correction. Legally, the series 2 TiVos (all that you can find at your corner TiVo store) all require a subscription to the service.
Old Series 1 TiVos can be used without subscription, as a sort of digital VCR.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
Not true (about the processor) - The Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-250 do all the processing onboard.
Here's a good resource: HTPCNews.com
Hauppauge's PVR-350 tv tuner card: $200
Tivo after rebate: $200
It's hard to justify the cost of building your own when a tivo is so cheap. I'd like to build my own, but I can't do it as cheaply as just buying tivo hardware. (Yes, I have a Tivo).
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
really?
Coolermaster component case atc-620 -$88.00
Motherboard with processor and integrated items-99.00
128 meg of ram $28.00
120 Gig hard drive - $99.00
OEM-boxed PVR-250 capture/tuner card $80.00
IR reciever + remote that is lirc compatable $40.00
$434.00 + tax
all from my local computer shoppe. It would have been cheaper if I went looking on ebay for the parts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have a 1GHz TBird + cheap mobo, 256MB RAM, a 40GB HD, cheap case, a GeForce 4 MX440, and a PVR250. I'm using ATI's Remote Wonder and running SnapStream PVS 3.4 beta (on Win2K) with myHTPC as a frontend. Functionality-wise, it's a great setup. I'm about to pop another 80GB drive in and I'll be set for a while. All in all, with parts I already had, I think it put about $500 into hardware and software and enjoy having the system.
On the downside, there was far too much fiddling I had to do to get things right. If I were to do it all again, I probably would just by a TiVO and get the home media option.
Bottom line: Whatever you do, get a PVR250/350 for your capture card. Software capture cards simply don't hold a candle. Everyone who starts with a WinTV Go or other software card ends up upgrading to a PVR250 (yours truly included). Do yourself a favor and go straight for the PVR250.
as someone who's never built a linux machine from scratch, i found this to be helpful:
Linux HTPC How-to
--brian
I've researched this a little bit before. IIRC, it works out to about $6 or $7 a month. There are a tremendous number of variables so it is difficult to predict a particular situation. for instance, many of the "old" PCs that people toss in the corner as headless file servers don't support idling. Rather than go into a low power state, the CPU runs at full power in a noop loop. Sometimes older machines don't spin down the disk properly either. Newer machines should go to a low power state much more readily, but will require much more power while they are running.
The grandparent post was correct that running an old pentium as a firewall rather than buying a LinkSys box for $50 is a foolish economy. Of course, if one requires capabilities that the simple box doesn't provide - that is a different story.
I'm a fan of the VIA mini-itx systems for "always on" applications. With judicious use of eBay, one should be able to assemble a decent low power system for less than $300. I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance. Think of them as about a 500 MHz Pentium equiv. Great little machines for a home file and print server, and they are practically silent aside from being good for the electric bill. If you run a mini-itx as your server/web-browser/email box and only use that Dual Athlon machine when you are actually gaming, you should see a noticable drop in your electric bill.
The worst mistake I ever made.
1;
Your math is somewhat flawed. Tivo ($149) + lifetime ($299) = $448 + TAX. That's only if you get the 40 GB version, add $100 for the 80 GB.
You're better off spending that $100 on a larger hard disk (bout 100GB for $100), and hacking it in.
You negelect to tell people one thing: Standard warranty on any Tivo/DirecTivo is 90 DAYS. Tivo lifetime subscription is linked to the box. Day 91, if your box burns up, you're out the whole bill. The only way you can transfer your subscription is if the box dies and is REPLACED BY THE MANUFACTURER UNDER WARRANTY. Many, many people have been burned by this.
I am a Tivo (series 1) owner. I'm going to build a MythTV box because I can't bring myself to blow another $500 on a single use box that I can't even web browse or play DVD's on. If the experiment fails, I have a PC for my daughter. If it works, I still have a PC for my daughter that also happens to record TV.
Can't press "record" on the TiVo from work, now can you?
Um, yes, actually.
PVR-250 is hopelessly inadequate for modern PVR. It's got an analogue tuner, FFS!!! At least get a DVB card.
"Though I don't know why you would buy lifetime service instead of paying the $4/month for service through DirecTV"
Actually, for the Directv/Tivo unit, you can't. There is no lifetime service option with Directv/Tivo, only the Tivo standalone units. You have to pay $5/month to Directv, who presumably shares some of that with Tivo. Plus, if you sign up for the full DTV package (HBO,Starz,etc) the $5 fee is waived.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
The reasoning for the different items are as follows:
A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.
Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.
WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.
Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.
Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.
MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.
Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.
Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.
Now all I have to do is wait...
Slightly off topic, but...
This is exactly the reason people should take an interest in mini-itx motherboards for home servers. A 60W power supply could feed one of the fanless 600MHz mini-itx boards at load. I don't have the means to measure, but I suspect at idle it runs around 15W (assuming the hard drive gets spun down during idle, which is not good for the lifetime of the drive, but good for power savings).
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
You are aware that you can buy a tivo unit with built in DVD burner for under $700, right?
p hp?masterid=1361996&ut=c0373404f6bde38f&found=2&se arch=DVR-810H
http://www.pioneerburner.com/
http://devsdeals.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.
Is your video editing and gaming that you can do on pretty much any PC woth the extra $1800? Didn't think so...
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
The things I see in your list that MythTV doesn't do is recording shows based on your viewing habits which is one of the things I find repulsive about TiVo, and Myth only supports a few codecs... see nuvexport/mencoder.
:)
- Record two standard (...) Check... in fact, the recording devices can be on different machines.
- Record standard TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-1, (...) OK, Myth's codecs are wrapped up in hybrid nupplevideo and require a touch of effort to convert.
- Playback using Dscalar to deinterlace the video. Check, optional deinterlacing built it.
- Play DVDs Check
- Play DivX Check
- Record shows as favorites (...) or based on my past viewing habits You can set up season-pass like sitations using the number of recording options and its priority system. I've already stated my opinion of guesswork recording
- Do all of the above with an integrated schedule, which is free. Check
- Play and manage my MP3 library Check
- Stream video and audio to another PC over my LAN. Check... as well as my X-Box
In addition, you get MythWeather which supplies weather reports to your screen, MythGallery for photos, MythGame which integrates with a number of emulators including MAME and NES emulators, MythWeb to set up recording over the internet. And you can theme it, it's free and runs on a free OS, the developers are fairly responsive and development is constantly moving forward. Go ahead and list your favorite features of SageTV and wait for them to be integrated into MythTV.
All that said, Sage does look like the most complete package for Windows (I used ShowShifter back in the day).
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Knoppmyth is a fully installable Knoppix(debian) distro with mythtv. Knoppmyth is a pvr, has tv with a guide to your local cable/sat provider, weather, news, a dvd playing, an mp3 player (and indexing, by group and album, with visualizations), cd ripper with artist and title lookup, emulator frontend, and vcd player.
You can burn the iso, assemble your pvr/media machine, boot of the iso, provide a few usernames and passwords and Knoppmyth will partition and install everything you need to get MythTV running on your system including mysql, xmltv, mythtv. As a bonus you get the magic of apt-get to install almost anything else you might want. The fontend program is very nicely done and it supports remote controls and external channel changers too.
-dameron
'apt-get install mythtv-suite' here... Damn, you got me by 2 characters. I guess the dependencies can be more difficult as the parent suggested :)
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I started looking into a replacement PVR solution when my DishNetwork sub ran up. My wife and I were hooked on the Dish501 PVR and hadn't watched TV bound to a schedule in more than a year. Our local cable provider (TW-Rochester) gave us a great deal on all the digital offerings with HBO @ 25.99 /mo for 12 months. Sounded like a good idea. I went on board with their PVR "solution", the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000.
Has anyone else used one of these clearly beta units? Ack!
That lasted about 3 weeks. So I sat down and looked at our needs and our options:
- Two tuners (the only nice feature of the SA8000)
- Intelligent recording options (record once/series/all)
- Sufficient storage (enough to fit the entire Tour De France: 20 stages x 3hrs. That was our unit of measurement. YMMV)
- Ability to record network channels (NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox)
- HighDef is a nice-to-have
Options:
- DirectTV with DirectTivo (No Rochester locals then) (~$550 for Series2 unit with big HD)
- DishNetwork with the Dish921 (High Def! Have to lie to get Plattsburgh locals) ($1000+)
- DishNetwork with the Dish721 (Have to lie to get Plattsburgh locals) ($500)
- Time Warner with SA8000 (Ack!) ($5 + $9 rental/mo)
- DIY box (???)
Wife gave the project a green light, and I bought the parts to build it. Motherboard with integrated LAN and VGA, $100; AthlonXP 1800+, $50; PVR250 Tuner cards, $130 x2; Wireless mouse & keyboard, $40. I already had a case and 120Gb drive.
It took a bit of work and a weekend to get it running the first time (Myth 0.11). Thanks so much to Jarod's guide. I tweaked it and broke some stuff about 3 weeks later, and rebuilt it. Only took 8 hrs that time.
Tweaked stuff again and broke it again. I should realize that it's a TV device, not a playtoy. This time I rebuilt it in 3 hrs. (That included restoring a backup of the programs saved on the HD.) ATRPMS with apt-get (thanks Axel) makes it a breeze.
It's been fine for the last month. It sits quietly mounted between floor joists in the basement crawlspace storage, where it is keep quite cool. As a bonus over Tivo, it has a picture gallery viewer of all the PCs in our house, it runs MAME and ZSnes, plays MP3s and shows the weather.
Thanks Issac and all the developers who put so much hardwork into a great project. Your efforts are very appreciated.
By the way: The best part about this being an open source, Linux based project? When there's a problem with the app and I'm not at home, I can ssh to it and fix it remotely. No more trying to explain things over the phone!
I use Snapstream PVS for my media center needs.
:)
My HTPC is an Athlon 2800, 1GB of RAM, an all-in-wonder 9600 Pro and a 3ware Escalade 7506-12 with 12 200GB Maxtor drives (two RAID10s of 600GB each) and 2 160GB Samsungs. It's in a 4U rackmount case with a 550 Watt PC Power and Cooling PSU. I use an Asus A7N8X Deluxe for a motherboard, with its support for Dolby Digital 5.1 on digital outputs. The PC is connected to an Integra DTR-8.2 receiver (that's its name, not how many speakers it supports) which itself can be controlled with its own radio frequency remote, and whose video switching and AV zone support I make full use of.
The whole thing is sitting in 19" rack in a closet, so I don't have to listen to it be all noisy.
It runs 2000 Server, mostly because, at the start of its life, I was working with 2000's soft-RAID features, and "Pro" versions of Windows don't do redundant RAID.
I use Snapstream PVS for TV-watching and recording, primarily because it integrates nicely with my ATI RF remote, and because it supports tuning my DirectTV receiver via a serial connection.
The PROBLEM with Snapstream is that it's not the paragon of stability that it should be. Every few days it flies off the deep end and takes my poor HTPC with it. I have a 35-hour DirectTivo for a back up and second video source, just in case.
I also have three 400-disc DVD carousels of varying ages that I use to house my collection of movies. The DVPCX985V is the newest of those, and the one I appreciate the most, since it support SACDs. The 3 jukeboxes are connected to each other and operate as a single logical unit.
Regular daily viewing is done on a 32" 16x9 Princeton display. It can handle HDTV signals but I haven't coughed up the cash for DirectTV HDTV reception or a video capture solution that works with HDTV. I also have an ancient, 800lumen, 800x600 Sony projector that I plan to replace when its bulb dies, probably with an NEC HT1000 (3000:1 contrast ratio).
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Of course not.
I want to do it because there are no TIVO like boxes available for sale in Canada (except one that is built into a satellite reciever).
If us Canucks want a PVR, we either have to go cross-border-shopping for something that doesn't require a subscription (which is not available for sale to us) or hack together something.
Which option do you suppose yer typical Canadian Slashdotter will go with?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I have a MythTV box so I speak from experience.
You *SHOULD* build a MythTV box IF:
- You are an experienced Linux user, have some extra hardware lying around (or money is no object), and are looking for a fun and interesting project to mess around with.
- You are an inexperienced Linux user, have some extra hardware lying around (or money is no object), and are looking for a fun and interesting project to learn Linux with.
- You are not one of the above, but absolutely must have the single best Multimedia Convergence box you can possibly have at all costs.
You should *NOT* build a MythTV box IF:
- You are an inexperienced Linux, user and have no money and no hardware lying around.
- You have no interest in learning Linux.
- You are an experienced Linux user, have no money and no extra hardware lying around.
- You want something that works now, not something that is sorta great now, but will be absolutely great later.
This exactly what I've been telling my friends when they get jealous of my MythTV box. I suspect in about a year or so, building a MythTV box will be a LOT simpler. Until then, follow my guideline above.
Bryan