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Build Your Own PVR
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?"
I still want one that supports Sky TV in the UK. I could take the output from the decoder box but then anything I wanted to record I would have to set the box and the PVR, defeating the purpose.
Anyone know how to put a Sky signal straight from the dish into a PC? They use some obscure encryption so even when you pay for a viewing card you cant use it.
Ok, Ok...
First of all, I get the idea this person is not a veteran of the linux industry. He does a good job of navigating through what are essentially basic problems.
I don't think its worthy to mention he had his jumpers wrong... everyone makes a jumper mistake and it is fairly easy to diagnose.
His major fault.... He purchased a Win-TV 250. This card is pretty good actually with onboard hardware mpeg2 encoding. (I own a 250 as well as a vanilla hauppage win-tv) The drawback to the Win-TV 250 is it does not have tv out. He should have spent a couple extra bucks and got the 350.
The next big mistake was relying on some integrated tv out solution. It's been my experience that onboard has the tendency to be slightly different then their off board branded brotherin. Thus, I can easily see why he had some troubles.
He said it himself, he suffers from some impulse buying habbits. I think a little more research on compatability would have turned up better linux results. Personally, I went into the linux pvr project with absolutely no starting knowledge other then getting my hauppage card working a long long time ago. (out of the box support made it no chore). However, knowing nothing about the task prompted me to research, research and well... read more.
I wish he had tried a Knoppix MythTV Live CD as I would like to have seen the results. ie. used knoppix CD and it worked! (probably not with the odd video out)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Has anyone tried KnoppMyth, which is basically a customized Knoppix ISO that anchors to the hard drive with MythTV? I have MythTV installed to a RH9 box, and it wasn't too difficult to install, but for a newb I suspect a CD installer would be easier. I looked at Windows products, but I really wanted the Mame/Emu frontend more than the PVR functions, so Myth was a no-brainer.
The only "issue" is that MPEG-4 really puts strain on my CPU, holding a Athlon 2600+ at ~60% while encoding.
I now do homework for the next day's courses instead of watching adult swim and the daily show at night. I also watched some football games with it, and having a frame-by-frame slow-mo is wonderful. What's even better is never watching commercials, cuts the time of shows way down. Even with a crappy four year old bt878-based capture card I get fine picture on my 19" monitor, which is better in color and brightness than my 19" TV.
I tried Freevo, which was horrid. I never got it to work correctly. But with a fresh installation of gentoo I had more trouble locating drivers for my TV card than getting mythtv set up and recording. The biggest major hurdle when installing was figuring out that my microphone was selected at the recording device, so I had to swap it to line in.
It wasn't point-and-click easy to set up, but it worked, and I suppose that's all that matters. Now that it is installed I havn't had one crash except when alsa was already in use and I tried to watch a recorded show (I really need a sound card with hardware mixer support).
His web site screams "tech moron". The bit killed me about never going to use the modem, and then proceeding to bend the case to make it fit anyway! He spends the first two thirds of the page meticulously documenting his incompetence in putting together hardware for all the world to see, then one paragraph on rebooting Linux and not everything working right away, and then off he goes into Windows bliss. And then the moral of the story is that Linux PVRs are not ready for prime time?! To quote Basil Fawlty, his wife clearly made a mistake.
I was thinking of building myself some kind of PVR too. I suppose I could have got myself a Sky Plus box, only this would have meant getting a dish -- and I happen to think they're ugly, compared to a cable buried discreetly under the pavement. I had the specs in my mind, and went out looking for parts.
Then in Dixons, I found the Philips DVDR-70 DVD+RW recorder. At 279.99, I snapped it up. This machine needs the more expensive DVD+RW discs. It can also use DVD+Rs, but the functionality is a bit more limited with one-time media. There are only two SCARTs, and you'll need both of them for the TV and the satellite/cable decoder; but it does have audio/video/SV ins on the front {meant for a camcorder so designated CAM1} which you can use in an emergency, and audio/video/SV outs around the back. As you would expect on any DVD player, the TV SCART has RGB out; but unlike a VCR the auxiliary SCART has RGB in.
Chapter points are added automatically during recording, or you can add them by hand - and the ability to block certain chapters allows you to implement a form of ad-skipping, which is vital for most cable/satellite recordings. The picure is rock-solid even at six-hour compression. It will play MP3 audio CDs through your TV or hi-fi, but not multisession discs - you'll have to burn them in one go. This should mean those annoying copy-protected discs will play fine, though, and there's no mention of disabling the digital audio out during certain kinds of playback {but I haven't been able to test this}.
Downsides? No HDD so you can't record and play back at the same time, and the picture blanks out while the machine is busy. No RF modulator, so you have to use the A/V connections; but you'd be throwing away the advantages of DVD anyway. And I didn't build it myself.
Conclusion: Worth the price, and you'll soon get to live with the quirks. Expect newer models to answer them anyway.
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Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!