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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.
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.
try hacking together a more advanced version of TVPlus?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
...has a great article on just this subject.
...I just came for the free beer.
Don't they call those a VCR?
TV Cards
Pretty helpful site for beginners.
Don't try to use one of these projects because you think it will be cheaper.
If you want to do it because you think there are other benefits, or because you like to tinker, go right ahead.
You will spend more than the cost of a Tivo plus lifetime service by the time you are done, though.
Hmm... PC $600 + about a month configuring it to work as a PVR.
Tivo + Lifetime sub $300-$400
I know which I'd go for...
It is tough to build a good one for cheaper than a TiVO. To build a PVR, you basically have to build a computer. To build a computer with a TV card in it, you will probably need more than $300. You'll need a large hard drive and a decent processor (1.6Ghz or higher is my guess). You can probably skip out on getting a dvd drive and cd drive if you don't them, so that might help the cost a little.
If budget is important, consider estimating electricity costs in a do-it-yourself solution. You might be surprised how much money worth of electricity a PC can use in just a year.
As an example, I've seen people "save money" by reusing old PC's as firewalls instead of buying a cheap $50 unit that does the same job. They're spending more money in electricity than it would have cost to buy the dedicated unit.
-Teckla
The only reason I'm still trying to keep my old Panasonic Showstopper ReplavTV alive is that MythTV and FreeVo don't yet have the capability to control an external digital cable or DirecTV box. I think there was some project that had rudimentary channel-changing capabilities for DirecTV via serial interface, but I think it was still pretty alpha. As soon as these projects can do that, I'm building a homebrew so I can cancel my land line phone...
Get a job or something.
Isn't the biggest problem STILL programming guide information? Don't things like XMLTV use web sites that sometimes block IP's from using them?
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.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
You also don't need to buy a subscription when buying a tivo. You can purchase just the hardware if you want. Of course not having the program listings and scheduling features kinda defeats the main benefit of PVRs.
To be really useful, a homemade pvr has to solve the problem of obtaining program listings.
I agree, it's actually not that cheap to build one from scratch. I looked into this a few months ago and found it would cost as much as a Tivo, if not more. Asus Pundit ~200 CPU ~150 RAM ~100 Hard Drive ~100 PVR card ~200 Total ~750
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.
If you, and the people who think this is insightful, can't see the difference between a Tivo (subscription required, arbitrary set of limitations decided on by the company) and a homemade PVR with any media playback/record capability you can put into a PC, then you've certainly made a wise choice. It's also easier to buy a standalone CD-copier than to deal with a CD-burner and various software, but it's not the same!
Now maybe people with something substantial to add to the discussion of homemade PVRs can post...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
A cheap Duron, hard drive, case, TV-out capable video card, and TV card is going to probably cost more than a stand-alone Tivo, so you are only saving on the "backend." I like the progress that I have seen in MythTV and Freevo, especially the integrated features like emulators and such. That is the appeal for me to build these type of solutions, not price.
FWIW, I am a DirecTV subscriber and the DirecTivo gives you a lot of functionality that you just can't easily replicate. It stores full quality video from the satellite feed on the hard drive. It also allows you to record two shows at the same time. That makes it well worth the price. Of course, mine has a 120 GB hard drive hacked in to give over 100 hours of storage.
Now I just need to figure out how copy the video from the Tivo. I can ftp and telnet into the system, but I haven't investigated the state of the extraction software lately. One of those projects I need to get to...
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.
> You also don't need to buy a subscription when buying a tivo. You can purchase
> just the hardware if you want. Of course not having the program listings and
> scheduling features kinda defeats the main benefit of PVRs.
If you plunk down $300 for the hardware, may as well plunk down the $250 for a lifetime subscription as well.
Just pretend the hardware costs $550, but in this way you will have full guide listings and no monthly fee.
Mom, can you tape the Simpsons? Mom, can you tape the Simpsons?
What you want to look at is not competing with what is there, but do what the future holds. I have a server that is doing VLC and can see ripped DVD's (my own) or listen to music via my computers or via the linux client that I run on the Telly. When KDE 3.2 is out fully, I will be using lirc to handle the dvd's/Music correctly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
- 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:I saw a review on Frevo. It seemed pretty shadey. It worked, in a kinda-sorta-maybe kind of way. It appeared that it had very strict hardware requirements and was less then reliable. Colors weren't very accurate and the actual quality of the playback was less than steller.
I would suggest doing a LOT of research so you have the right hardware and know what to expect if you do go this route.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
I got my TiVo for about 100 bucks. I use DirecTV and am using a DirecTivo... so for me the cost is pretty much hidden away in the satellite bill. $5/month.
;) But I understand about the advantages of having an HTPC... but anyways... good luck.
The Tivo works. It's easy and simple.
Worth the cashola. For a DIY'er... go for the HTPC solution but you will end up paying more upfront. You figure what a $100 on the video card... or maybe more and say $350-$400 at a minimum for a PC...... so 500 bucks
The TiVo is cheaper... unless you keep it for over 6.5 years
(DirecTV has been running $99 special for series 2 Tivo's for a bit...... and you can always find really good deals on Ebay from legit independents)
The Tivo's real genius is that it is so blasted easy that trying to copy all of what it does is hard. It's the research that has gone into it that makes it what it is. I also have a Replay 5040 for backup, but if my Tivo died, I'd go out to CCity/BBuy and get one immediately. I've given the Tivo the mom test, and it passed with flying colors. My mother who hates technology and my obsession with gadgets would also replace her tivo should it expires.
I havn't ever had a computer with so few glitches, it's been running along since 8/01 and hasn't been shut off unless the power went out in all that time... and it still works great.
A few caveats, IMHO I've got the best type of Tivo the DVR for DirecTV which is intigrated with my sat service, and has the two tuners for duel recording, and I have upgraded the HDD in my Tivo so I have 80 hrs of storage.
As far as the computer solutions, I think I'd recommend SageTV, but that carries with it the fee involved as well. Whatever way you go, it'll be worth it. I was in a hotel a few nights ago, and was going crazy without that ability to pause, rewind, and skip commercials.
Peace!
Jim
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
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
If you run Gentoo Linux, then Myth is VERY easy to setup. MythTV itself and all the major plugins have up to date ebuilds (packages).
Good documentation and links on www.mythtv.org.
I recommend a Haupauge WinTV card for your TV tuner.
If the Haupauge card has "PVR" in the title this means it has hardware MPEG encoding. Otherwise, you will need a fairly modern CPU (probably at least 1 GHz).
I can see getting a lot of geek satisfaction out of building one of these things, but to use it as a day-in/day-out DVR, I don't think it makes a lot of financial sense. First thing is that it's expensive. A TiVo with a lifetime subscription costs about $500. The WinTV-PVR 350 card alone is most of the cost of the TiVo hardware. I have yet to see an example of building one of these things for that low of a price.
Second, if you've got DirecTV, then there's no DVR that you can build that's going to do as good of a job of capturing the signal as the DirecTV DVR w/TiVo (DTiVo). The DTiVo simply copies the already MPEG encoded stream that DirecTV sends. Thus the DTiVo doesn't need an expensive (and relatively low quality) hardware MPEG encoder. Which means that the DTiVo can be found for serious cheap, sometimes even for free. Assuming that a homebrew DVR costs about $800 to build, you could get a free DTiVo and put the $800 towards 13 yrs 4 mos worth of monthly fees.
Still it sounds like a fun project. But it seems like you'd be paying for the entertainment of putting it together. Not for the low cost of the DVR.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
yeah, if all you want to do is PVR, then just buying a TiVO makes sense. But if you really want a convergence device to tie your tv into the network -- tivo can't compete.
with a roll-your-own, you could add all sorts of functionality:
. streaming non-mpeg2 video clips from across the network
. listening to your mp3 collection on your living-room sound system
. watching a slideshow of digicam vacation pics . firing up an emulator and enjoying some pong
. actually web browsing from a fully functional machine (add wireless keyboard for full effect)...
Tivo is fine functionality, but there's no reason to stop there. not when Tivo + lifetime subscription ~= cost of rolling your own
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
I went through the build process of a DIY PVR. Eventually I stuck with MythTV after trying Freevo and some others, because of all the kick ass plugins for myth. The most useful piece of advice I have is pay attention to the hardware you're going to use first, and then add software.
:)
The $45 ATI TV-Wonder you can get at best buy isn't going to cut it. This thing is ok for watching TV, but it's not even great at that. You definately want a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG2 encoding, preferably at 12MB/s. I'd recommend a Hauppauge product. You may even want to look into HDTV tuner cards, although I have no experience with them.
In the end the quality of your hardware is going to matter most, because regardless of the software you use to accomplish your goal, the end result will only be as good as the hardware that was used to capture the image.
I had a TiVo, but sold it after I built my own PVR. TiVo is great, and did some things my PVR doesn't (like suggested viewing), but all in all there's nothing better than your own home rolled PVR
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I've been using a Myth box for 7 months now. It's great. It is a TiVo plus more. I bought a nice little Shuttle XPC case, Athlon 1800+, and a 80 Gig hard drive. I now have a real home theater media center box with PVR, movie library, audio library, image gallery, and weather services.
I cannot recommend MythTV any more highly. It really is the way to go, especially for those who love to hack around with Linux.
--- witty signature
Or directTV tivo. 99 dollars for the tivo (with 1 year contact) and free tivo service if you have the 37.99 package or higher. (Which just became cheaper than comcast as my rates just went up almost 5 dollars in my area).
Just to clarify, 'Lifetime Subscription' means the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the subscriber. As soon as you upgrade to a new model you have to pay out for subscription again, bear this in mind before you pay it. Ok for normal users who will buy it and keep it until it falls apart, but not so good for the geek who has to have the latest tech.
Try the Video Disk Recorder. You can download it here.
This is a FREE and completely non-commercial project. Any information posted on these pages is freely available to anybody. All source code published here is protected by the GNU general public licence.
Features include (copy & paste):
* Operation entirely via DVB card's On Screen Display and infrared control (LIRC/RCU) or keyboard
* Support for multiple DVB cards (up to four, at least one full featured card with video out required) and "conditional access" (CICAM)
* Channel groups
* EPG display by channel or by time ("What's on now/next")
* Timers: Programming via EPG or manually, priority/lifetime model, single-shot or repeating timers which use EPG subtitle info as recording's title additionally
* Recording storage on disk: Automatically splitting of recording into files (2GB), support for multiple storage directories (may be spread over multiple disks), support for hierarchical storage
* Support for multiple audio tracks and Dolby Digital
* Instant recording
* Playback modes normal, pause, fast forward/backward (multi speed), jump to specific location, jump 60 seconds
* Support for editing recordings (with I-frame accuracy: ~1/2 second)
* Multiple language support
* Support for executing system commands and displaying output on screen
* Network support (SVDRP): Manage timers and recordings via telnet
* Automatic shutdown/wakeup (with certain mainboards)
* Support for automatically executing commands upon recording start/end and editing recordings
New in version 1.2
* Instant Time Shift
* Plugin interface (see the list of available plugins).
* Additional remote control keys
* Macros can be assigned to remote control keys
* Multiple recordings on the same device
* Simultaneous recording and replay on the primary device
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
It's not cheaper, but definitely more flexible in what you can do. For example, I built an all-in-one box with an Athlon XP 2400+, two Hauppauge WinTV dbx stereo tuners doing software encoding to DivX format (this was before PVR-250's became stable on Linux), 2x200 gig hard drives using LVM for volume management, 512 megs of ram, and a cheapy Geforce 4MX card for TV out in a Coolermaster 610 desktop case (looks like a nice stereo component case. Also, throw in some quiet power supply from Zalman, a flower cooler for the CPU, etc. Total price was probably around $1200. I can record two programs at once and have 10 times more space than the standard TiVo, plus it basically has the "home media option" built into MythTV. ;-) So, you can buy your $700 Tivo (home media option $99, Tivo w/40 gig drive is around $300, and the lifetime subscription is $300), or just spend a little more and get much more. I'd do it with PVR-350 cards these days though if I were to redo it. I'll be splitting off my front end machine from the backend soon and replacing the tuners with PVR-250 cards which do hardware mpeg-2 encoding. I'll use an Epia M10000 Nehemiah based front end machine. Should be fun. :-)
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.
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. -=-=-=-=-
Simple math, but how much of the 300 watts is used for an idling PC
There's no way a PC without a monitor is going to draw 300 Watts unless it's a specialty super-computer. (i.e. Runs at 100% CPU power at all times, while making use of heavy draw hardware such as GPU rendering.)
150 Watts is a much better average. 24 hours a day, with ~30 days in a month, at 150 watts gives:
24*30*150 = 108,000 Watt-Hours = 108 Kilowatt-Hours
Look up what you're paying per KW hour and multiply that by 108. For example, 10 cents per KWH gives you a monthly cost of $10.80.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Or buy one of these and call it a day. It's cheeper the TiVo and no service is required!
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.
With that said, I will only buy a PVR if it has the following options:
1. Built-in DVD player that does VCD/SVCDs, Divx and Xvid.
2. 10/100 ethernet
3. Standard network file system access to my recordings with NFS and Samba file sharing.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
The worst mistake I ever made.
1;
Offload to a Philips DVD+R-type device in 'unprotected' mode and pop it into your computer...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
http://www.solarpc.com/20.htm
It has:
Those are the bare neccesities if your just going to be cheap. I am cheap/poor too, so that is all I have. Someday I'll get a nice DVD burner so I can archive stuff I might want to see again somday. I also want a wireless keybaord.
For further info check out the PVR Hardware Database:
http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-view_ar
They have a page with some nice installation guides:
http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-page.php?
As you can see I am all for building a MythTV box, but having built one, I have to warn you that the software isn't perfect yet. It really kicks Tivo's ass in terms of functionality (I love the MythWeb interface, and you can set it too completely cut out commercials, which it does surprisingly accurately), but it still can be a little buggy sometimes and should only be used by people who like to tinker.
I built a MythTV box and went the Mini-ITX route for $500. I paid more for the small size, considering I could have gotten more CPU power, etc. for less money.
.deb packages since I was using the
For case, I used the Morex Cubid 2699R. It's about the size of a 12" pizza box (much smaller than the VCR that it replaced!), and uses a 50W external power supply, which *significantly* cuts down on noise. My hard drive is the biggest contibutor to noise with this setup. I got my case for about $80 US.
I keep it in my TV cabinet without an attached mouse, keyboard, or monitor. Just connected to TV and my LAN, and controlled via remote control.
You can see pics and a review of its older cousin at:
http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/2688R/
As for the rest, I got:
Motherboard:
VIA EPIA M10000 ($150-$160 US) - Has onboard ethernet, 5.1 audio, video,
and one PCI slot. Processor is already on it. Processesor has
exceptionally low power requirements (compared to high-end AMD/Intel).
Memory:
Crucial 512mb DDR (if you do decide on the 2699R case, make sure the RAM
height is below 34mm or it won't fit - the Crucial fit just fine)
Tuner:
Hauppauge PVR-350 (less than $200 via pricewatch.com)
Its included remote works really well under LIRC
DVD:
Some generic slimline DVD player for $55.
If you get the 2699R case, you need a slimline which means more $$
Note that as of current date, MythDVD and MythVideo don't work
with the PVR-350, so you won't be able to watch DVD's (yet).
Hard drive:
I used an old IBM drive laying around, I plan on upgrading to a Seagate Barracuda which is rated at 20dB while idling.
Now the pros and cons of my setup:
Pros:
Very small, very quiet
PVR-350 with the Epia M10000 uses only 3% (!!!) CPU utilization during
playback and record
Front of case has firewire/usb connections if I need later on
Even without MythDVD or MythVideo support, it's already better than a
commercial Tivo because (1) I can record at higher bitrate and resolution,
and (2) I have direct access to the recorded videos, so that (3) I can
archive to DivX or DVD...
Cons:
No DVD or avi/quicktime/etc. file playback since I've using a PVR-350 (hopefully soon though!)
I couldn't use the already built 0.11
PVR-350. I ended up compiling both IVTV and MythTV CVS instead.
Since there's no attached keyboard/mouse/monitor, I need to ssh from
a different computer on the network, but I actually prefer it this way
Hope that helps
I've always maintained that buying a real Tivo was always the cheaper option, especially if you count the costs of your time involved. Now, even not counting those costs the commercial product is much cheaper! If "cheap" is really what you want (as it's listed in your request) then you really need to look at it closely.
With a new account (1 year contract) at DirecTV or Dish you can get a free or cheap PVR included... and many other benefits (3 rooms, free installation, etc. etc.). Certain plans (Platinum level or some shiiiiii) even give you the PVR subscription fee included (or included in your receiver mirroring fee).
I'm not saying you shouldn't try building one yourself, but the argument was usually "I could build one cheaper with parts I have lying around" however most people then went out and spent $75-$100 on a brand new capture card. With subsidized
MythTV has definitely progressed along the years, but it's still not 100% reliable (what open-source anything ever is truly complete, tested, and waranteed). That being said, it definitely has some other cool "Media" functions that I really would like in my family room. Of course, I'm not willing to live with the ugly beige box and noise (before you say silent processors and slimline cases, add those costs to your initial argument).
If I truly had the hardware lying around (I don't) and I truly wanted a project not just the end Tivo functionality (I don't) and I was willing to put up with all the tinkering and annoyances required (I might be, wife definitely isn't) then I would consider doing it.
--Darren
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.
Which HD tuner do you use? Would you recommend it? How is the image quality? How much did it cost?
Thanks,-Turkey
>> not so good for the geek who has to have the latest tech.
But a used TiVo with an intact lifetime subscription should be worth at least $100-150 more on the secondary market than one without, shouldn't it?
It was always my understanding that the lifetime subscription was transferrable (since, as you point out, it's for the life of the unit).
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)
If you have any intent on building up a legal and huge collection of movies by capturing them off of cable TV, and you want to be able to play those movies on a standard consumer DVD player, then you must get a hardware MPEG-2 encoder.
The general rule about software MPEG-2 encoders is this: quality, low-CPU, realtime; pick any two.
If you don't care about being able record to DVD, and/or you want to record to DiVX and envision a house where all of your DVD players are DiVX-capable, then a $30 stereo tuner card will suffice for now.
I have two AverTV Stereo cards that are going up on eBay, because I decided that I really do want to record good quality MPEG-2 to DVD. I need to be able to hand my wife/kids a DVD of the favorite shows that she missed because I made them leave the house. I will be getting a PVR-250 like everybody else.
Note also that this advice applies to Windows people just as much as it does for Linux people. There are no software, high-quality, realtime MPEG-2 coders that don't require an overclocked cryogenically cooled CPU, regardless of what OS you run.
-Rick
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
Ok, I'm a couple hundred posts too late to get moderated to a level at which anyone will read this, but here goes. I had always been facinated by recording television and doing video capture. Way back in the day (ok, 7 years ago) I started with a Zoran chip composite capture card and broadcast my home game-playing table to the internet for people who'd watch me play Magic: the Gathering. (Yes, I'm a colossal geek...) Fast forward to the last couple of years. Being the last geek on my block without a dedicated PVR and with Microsoft pushing out Media Center, and with me being a MSDN+Select customer, I thought I'd try it out. You can easily skip the rest of this and just go to AVSFORUMS. They have a message board you can't possibly keep up with :)
I purchased the Hauppauge PVR-250 (which, essentially is the 350 without radio), and gave it a try as a fulltime device behind one of the AV switches on my Pioneer (read: noisy) receivers. Media Center did just peachy. The interface is slicky and it just FEELS like a media center. But I was stuck with ASF files that took too much work to convert to a readable format for other people.
So, I looked into Snapstream. Snapstream was, essentially, Media Center with the ability to record native DVD and SVCD formats, and the ability (recently) to overnight downsample to DiVX;) for archiving.
But it wasn't quite right.
So, I turned next to my cable company's integrated DVR solution. Cox peddles the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 for another $10 a month, and with it, I get two-tuners and a good, but worse feature set than either of the software packages.
So, let me say this, if you NEED, and I don't just mean once to impress your mother upstairs out of the basement, to burn DVDs of your TV programs, or unless you NEED to archive lots of TV to DiVX;) or some other handy archive format, don't build yourself a PVR except as a hobby or to do it.
Get a TiVo. Get a DirecTiVo. Get the Cox PVR. You'll get it for much cheaper than that $150+ capture card, the $100 hard drive, the $50 video card with good looking TV-out and the $100 motherboard and case. Oh, and that case -- don't expect to enjoy watching TV unless you've purchased SILENT parts for your PC. Zalman coolers and Panflow fans aren't cheap. You won't have to fuss with overscan or underscan from your video card on your too-old no-DVI input TV either. You'll have about 200 less wires in your living room too. You also don't have to wonder what channel your TiVo accidentally used the IR-remote to change your TV too. Did it get 10 or 100 today? /shrug. I hope I got 24 and not Maricopa County Educational Television...
Anyway, if you're a geek, and I am, and you have to play with the video you catpure, go software, or at least choose an off-the-shelf PVR that lets you add a network card.
If not, for the love of god, suck up $7 or $10 a month (cheaper still than buying PVR hardware) and get the benefits of dual-tuner capture and integrated CLEAN LOOKING -----SILENT----- hardware for your TV watching experience. And, for the love of god, unless you have a TV that doubles as a PC monitor, stop trying to watch TV on it. You're going to be disappointed.
[This isn't to say that you can't ultra-geek it, build a nice home theater box, in an expensive case, using quiet parts, and connect it to your TV that's already suitable for DVI inputs and have a BETTER solution that includes DVD playing, MAME playing, etc. -- but the reality is that unless you're going into the DEEP END of the hobby -- that's right -- hobby, you're much better off with going to X-Mart and getting a TiVo, or just calling your cable company.]
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!
no trouble in North America with MythTV (xmltv). I did have to upgrade it a couple of times..
urpmi xmltv
Not much trouble and the flipside is I've got a full featured PC plugged into my HDTV (sure was nice watching those Quicktime Matrix previews on a big screen).
Quack, quack.
I'd support an open project that left most of the control in my hands, but I understand Tivo nixed the commercial skip. Does Tivo have user developed plugins or any additional features being added by the community?
Quack, quack.
I thought about spending $600 to build a mythtv box and then $10-$15 a month in electricity to run it, but decided a ReplayTV would be cheaper ($200 + $10 a month), easier for my wife to use, and would do most of what I wanted.
I chose replay over Tivo because it was much ($100 or so + $5 a month) cheaper for the ReplayTV with ehternet and sharing and picture viewing and all that, plus it has auto-commericial-skip (beware: the 55xx series does not). I wish it had the thumbs up/down thing, but nothing is perfect.
Now, if mp3 and video game emulation are must-haves, then build the MythTV box. Tivo also supports mp3, but you have to spend $100 + $5 a month or something for their permission to listen to your music.
Not all time is billable. Putting together a MythTV is _fun_, not _work_. If you can build one for $400, and assemble it in your spare time for fun, it only cost $400. If you build MythTV's to sell for a living, I guess it's fair including your time as a cost... :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I bought one of these neat little power meters a while back, and went around measuring everything icould get my hands on.
My laptops use ~45 watts with the screen on, without the screen it is about 35 watts (one is a PII366, the other a PIII-1GHz, both have 12" screens)
My P4 systems all use about 150 watts (no monitor) in idle (not powerdown, drives spinning) state. The worst I could manage running benchmarks was around 200W. Monitors vary a lot. Mine run about 3w in sleep, about 20W active.
1kwHr/day = ~42 Watts always-on.
electricity here is about $0.07 kW/hr which means I pay $1 per month for each 20W always-on in my apt.
My laptops cost me about $2 each. My computers $7 each.
My SMC firewall uses 7W, and it costs much less to operate than the old Cyrix 166 that used to fill that task (besids which, it doesn't use much more electricity than the wireless router I had before, and also replaces that)
So I'm all for specialized products to fill my needs. Of course, I have a dedicated MythTV PVR box I built myself (which is one of those $7/month electricity expenditures), but I wanted the ability to do multiple simultaneous recordings, have a web-interface , and have multiple front-ends (all of which were not availiable on Tivo until recently, and which have premium costs attached). But it wasn't a cost decision. I just like to tinker.
Except for the fact that you will most likely be doing this in your free time when you would otherwise not be working. You would lose time when you could be relaxing or spending time with other people, but not money.
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
Then there's the noise factor. Tivos are whisper quiet... To make a PC that quiet wou can easily add another $100 onto the base price. I use a Zalman cooler, even satisfied the girlfriend.
Quack, quack.
I had a Via Epia "800mhz" that I intended to use as a low-end media center. It couldn't even smoothly decode DivX files, much less encode stuff like a PVR would. It was worthless.
With urpmi and Easy Urpmi and Thac's configured properly (follow instructions). You can install it in a few minute, with no compiling.
urpmi mythtv
Thats xmltv and everything.
Quack, quack.
I had one of the old Epias without built-in MPEG support... and I just noticed comments about using a card with hardware support for this stuff... So maybe it's possible. (sigh) Never mind.
However, if you do have to have a box...I think you can rig up one of those 'IR Blaster' setups..that point the ir lights at your box...and the computer changes the box's channels that way.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
At least the pubes are blurred out, in order to prevent the image from being obscene.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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...)
MythTV has something that I haven't seen from any of the commercial players: MythWeb. Fully configuratble recording/list browsing/etc in a nice web interface (don't trust the screenshots on the MythTV website - they're old and out of date, and I haven't had time to make any of the new version). My MythTV box is rarely used for actually watching TV these days. I set up what I want to record via MythWeb, and archive shows to SVCD to be watched later on my dvd player.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
I'm on my 3rd TIVO currently. The first 2 died after over a year of use. I purchased a new TIVO each time and payed for a lifetime subscription to the service since TIVO will not transfer the subscription to a new TIVO. Now my current TIVO's modem is dead. I switched to using my LAN and cable modem to connect to the TIVO service and that worked for a while until I moved. Then I had to go through the setup. It seems you have to have the modem working to finish the TIVO setup. Therefore, I'm in a catch 22. I cannot use the TIVO until I finish the setup. I cannot finish the setup without the modem working. The modem is integrated on the motherboard so I cannot replace it without replacing the motherboard.
I could buy another TIVO and the subscription but after three bad TIVOs I'm not inclined to do so. I could send it back to the manufacturer.
Perhaps I should just build my own. At least I could replace parts as needed when they go bad. I've avoided using Linux up to this point since it isn't necessary for my work. The question is, is it worth it? Should I just forget about owning a DVR? I really like selecting shows to record and letting the TIVO figure out the times the show is on and automatically recording for me. How about my cable set top box? My TIVO can control it so I can record the digital channels. Is that feature possible with a home made DVR?
History is so yesterday!
>>Can't press "record" on the TiVo from work, now can you?
>Um, yes, actually.
This is misleading. By "..press 'record' on the TiVo from work..." I presume the poster means scheduling recordings over the internet. This cannot be done with a stock TiVo, at least with the Series2 I have. One must purchase the pricey ($99) "Home Media Option" to be able to do this. With MythTV and SnapStream it comes for free.
And at the end of a month, he will probably know a thing or two about managing video streams, caching, fs tuning, how TiVo works in the first place, and probably a thing or two about building small databases with large BLOBs attached, and maybe start figuring out how to network the FreeVo together with the rest of his LAN so he can watch CNN from his laptop on the porch.
At the end of the same month, however, one who just buys a TiVo will probably know how to watch television.
Whatever happened to taking on a challenge just because it's there?
This is not my sandwich.
Yes, you did miss much more. But apparently not my post from 10/15/03
Seriously man, you reposted my message word for word, including punctuation, without even crediting me!
Is anyone else tired of hearing about people building PVRs and HTPCs that have no ability to record digital cable/setellite feeds? How many high-tech home-theater gurus do you know who only subscribe to basic cable. Until someone figures out a reasonable way to get digital Satellite and Cable (I'm NOT talking about terrestrial HDTV) onto a hard-drive, building a personal PVR seems like a patience-stretching, expensive, excersize in pointlessness. An Uber-recorder needs to have built-in Cable/Satellite decoding if it's going to be of any use to someone who has 500 channels. Honestly, if all you've got is standard basic cable, you might as well save your time and money you'd spend on a PVR and go get Digital Cable for a couple years. Maybe you won't be able to record anything, but at least you'll always have something to watch.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Then here's a response to you:
Problems with SageTV:
--Matthew
I am about to retire my current PC (P3 733, 384MB RAM, 140GB, SBLive -- running Gentoo Linux), and was seriously considering turning it into a Tivo-like device. My question (which I assume others have as well) is what do I need to do to a standard existing PC to turn it into a PVR? I know I need to buy a PVR card (I was looking at the Hauppauge ones), but is there anything else I need? Do I need a video card with video out to connect the box to a TV, or will the PVR card handle this? If I don't want to only use a TV, can I view the content easily on my monitor? What if I want it to work with a remote control? Is this possible (especially under Linux)? Anything connected to my TV had better be remote-control operated :-).
I would greatly prefer to stay with Linux, but I would be willing to switch distros if that would make setup easier.
P.S. I am a student, so I don't have any electricity costs. The university pays the electric bills, so I don't really care that having a PC on all the time costs a few extra dollars per month.