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Build Your Own PVR

Posted by michael on from the some-assembly-required dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "One geek's trials and tribulations of buying a ReplayTV, hating it, and deciding to build his own Linux PVR from nothing. The first try sinks into the swamp (hardware problems). The second try sinks into the swamp (more hardware problems). The third try... you get the idea. But success, finally, based on SageTV, a Windows PVR client. Makes you wonder if current Linux PVR apps are just too much of a pain to get working well?"

7 of 469 comments (clear)

  1. MYTHTV does this allready! by Nicholas_D · · Score: 5, Informative

    www.mythtv.org the best PVR ever... it does everything, great UI, great support (pchdtv card, HARDWARE MPEG2 encoder/tuner cards.) Absolutley great functionality and pretty to boot! I think this answers this articles question!

    --
    Home Sweet Home Linux
    1. Re:MYTHTV does this allready! by prockcore · · Score: 5, Informative

      mythtv has a lot of great ideas, but it is way too buggy right now.

      Watch a half hour program. then mythtv crashes and locks the device so you can't even restart it without rebooting.

    2. Re:MYTHTV does this allready! by The+Vulture · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'll add another to the "me too" count, MythTV works fine for me. I even own one of the supposedly troublesome combos of a VIA KT400 chipset and a PVR-250, and it's working fine. We'll see how that works when I put another PVR-250 in the mix, but for now it works.

      As a bonus, there's a website that has step-by-step instructions, using apt-get for everything on Fedora Core 1. You could pretty much copy/paste the directions, and have a MythTV machine up and running in less than one hour. That website would be here.

      -- Joe

  2. Building A Low-Budget TiVo Substitute? by truthgun · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was an Ask Slashdot on this very topic not so long ago:

    Building A Low-Budget TiVo Substitute?

    --
    Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in.
  3. MythTV by ghideon · · Score: 5, Informative

    After looking around at alternatives to Tivo, I settled on MythTV [MythTV.org]. Lots of plugins (DVD, Video, etc) and surprisingly stable.
    I run an Epia Nehemiah 1Ghz w/512 MB RAM with a Hauppauge PVR 350. The web front end makes all my Tivo using coworkers drool. Yes, it was a pain in the rear to get everything working, but in the end, I gained some knowledge and have one neat little system.

  4. MythTV worked brilliantly by afra242 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I tried building my own "Tivo"-like box too in Linux. It eventually cost a bit more than buying a Tivo, but I use it as my DVD burning and mp3 jukebox in addition to MythTV.

    Installed Debian on it with similar hardware as the author of the article had. I had no problems whatsoever, though I've been using Linux since '98.

    If you want just a Tivo box for cheap, I don't suggest doing it unless you want shady quality. Get a damned good TV Card (like the PVR-250 which does encoding on the hardware - this is around $120 alone), and a huge hard drive, and a good amount of memory. If you have the PVR-250, you don't need such a powerful CPU as the MPEG encoding is handled by the PVR.

    All in all, it was worth the time. I never have to look back and it's simply an amazing solution. I've been using Myth for about 8 months and it never stops to amaze me.

  5. ExtremeTech article on building a home threatre PC by glinden · · Score: 5, Informative

    ExtremeTech has a good recent article on building your own home theater PC (basically, a high end PC-based PVR). Nice configuration they got there. I'm thinking of doing something similar, but with the Antec Overture case.