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Second Generation Homebrew PVR Devices
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the second generation of homebrew PVRs is on its way. Asus recently released their Digimatrix barebones PC which combines a lot of features in a very slim and stylish box. DVD/CD-R, WiFi, HDTV tuner, FM Tuner, memory card reader etc. All for ~$400. The reviews look good, except that the software that comes with it doesn't look all that great... of course this may not be a problem because there has already been significant effort in getting linux to run on it and most features are working. Combine MythTV with this device and you have an almost perfect PVR? I wonder what other hardware companies have in store for the homebrew PVR market?"
There is no HDTV tuner. If you read the article, you'll see that it supports 'HDTV output', eg, VGA (since any HDTV that doesn't have a VGA port on the back can take a VGA signal (at the right rez) using a component adapter.
The rig in the article can only record regular TV.
Unfortunately, their distributor forces you to buy a copy of Windows XP along with the computer.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
You know I am pretty sure creating such a beast shouldn't be a problem. Watch.
Step 1: Get yourself a small form factor PC, like the ThinkGeek Cappucino or The Open Brick or build your own cool looking mini PC.
Step 2: Get yourself a USB DVD drive (brownie points for DVD burners)
Step 3: Get a USB TV Card that runs under Linux (Note: I did a quick google, but I'd bet money you could find one that worked much better. And that page was talking about spotty TV signals in 2002. I bet it's gotten better)
Step 4: Download a copy of MythTV
Bingo! You've now got a PVR which will either look nice in your stereo cabinet (like that ThinkGeek case), or which you can keep hidden, save for the external DVD drive (and since every DVD player has a DVD drive in it, you're not going to find anything with a much smaller footprint). And, it shouldn't be too hard to hide the OpenBrick. And all for under $1500.
Out of curiosity, what would you use it for? The aforementioned guy had no idea why he did it, he just wanted to make his car more "tech" apparently.
well, it's not *quite* as thin... but if you have the money there certainly are sexy cases out there for mini-itx EPIA VIA motherboards... throw in a right angle pci riser and a hauppauge wintv PVR 350 and you should be dancing, right?
There are distro's of linux tailored to run on this platform too...
*Shrug*
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
The only seller they link to has it at about US$1,200
Froogling it shows a good number of them at 450, but that's pure bare bones, no proc, no drives (not even the dvd/cdr you mentioned)
Combine MythTV with this device and you have an almost perfect PVR?
I have a fair bit of experience with MythTV. I've been using it for around 6 months now with both a Bt878 card and a PVR-350. And I wouldn't say "almost perfect". Pretty nice/cool, yes, but far from perfect. A friend has a TiVo that we use a lot.
Here are some thoughts:
MythTV/PVR can be somewhat cheaper (and big/ugly) or it can be quite a bit more expensive than a TiVo when using a nice case like in this article.
TiVo subscription fees suck.
MythTV and/or the PVR drivers crash or flake out. Some times I get interference bars across the recordings, a reboot fixes it. Not all the time, but sometimes. TiVo don't crash.
MythTV can run multiple tuners. Although not really that great a bonus. I used to run several tuners but I never watched all the crap it recorded anyway. I'm using one tuner now and that's more than enough.
MythTV can be daunting to install and configure. It takes a lot of time. There is KnoppMyth which is pretty easy and preconfigured, but it doesn't always work and still requires some configuration.
MythTV makes it "easy" (if you ignore configuration pain) to use remote frontends so you can watch TV on any computer on the network.
MythTV makes it easy to burn DVD's of your recorded shows or save the video for archival purposes.
This post is a little simplistic. I've downloaded mythtv and even used knoppixmyth which is even easier to use, but getting things to work are far from easy.
Bingo = between two days and a week of effort.
From what I can tell, all the people who've gotten mythtv to work successfully have used a hauppage pvr-250 or pvr-350. Other brands work, but need considerable tinkering.
I think I'm going to document my entire "journey" to help other people get going faster...
Pentium M desktop isn't available, only laptop processors at this point. If you could buy individual Pentium M's they wouldn't be cheap "the slowest Pentium M, a 1.3GHz chip, costs $209 with 1M byte of cache.. That's from Infoworld in January, not sure if there has been a price drop on them yet.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
How about 449.99 barebone. Most of the other parts you should already have.
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http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?d
Newegg is the slashdot of shopping.
It's been a while since I've seen a USB TV tuner, but you might want to be careful with those things. In college, my roomate had a USB TV tuner, and I had a PCI TV Tuner. There was a very noticable difference in quality. The USB bus is limited to 12 megs a second, while PCI is limited to 33 megs a second. I'm completely speculating that that is the cause of the difference in quality, but you should still be careful with those things.
A Hauppage PVR-350 works great for a MythTV box, and has a built in TV-Out that works in linux. Then you get a TV Tuner + TV out in one PCI slot.
Not even remotely true. I have an AverMedia TV Stereo, about the most generic software-driven cap card you can find, and Knoppmyth was pretty much a breeze to install. Only glitch was a formatting issue with XMLTV, which really wasn't Myth's fault. The latest KnoppMyth is supposed to have resolved this, or what I did was read the KnoppMyth forums and apply a small change to the XMLTV script. Woo hoo. Done.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Just use slow spinning 120mm, 92mm, and 80mm fans rather than fast spinning 70mm and 40mm fans.
My microATX system runs with a 120mm fan in its ATX power supply. When idle it spins at about 1,000 RPM's. It's maximum rating is 2,000 RPM's. It self adjusts depending on load. That is less than 20db once the case is closed up.
Then I modded that same case for a 120mm fan in the front of it (from the normal 80mm fan) and I run it at 1,200 RPM's (I use a rheostat to adjust its voltage/RPM). Then I use a 92->80mm fan adapter on the cpu heatsink with a large Alpha 8045 (80x80x45mm) heatsink with copper inlay. This fan runs at about 1,000 RPM's, but it has a heat sensor on a wire that I can place anywhere. I chose to tape it to the side of the heatsink and that keeps the fan at about 1,800 RPM's under load and 1,000 RPM's idle. If you tape the thermal sensor for this fan to another area, it will run at a slower or faster rate, depending on how hot that surface gets.
Then I modded the back of the case (click on the "back view" to see it) to allow a 92mm fan in there rather than 80mm. I run it at 1,000 RPM's.
Now, every fan in a normal default factory case runs at about 2,500-4,000 RPM's by default and are only 60-80mm wide. A 120mm fan at 1,000 RPM's pushes the same amount of air (provided there is little restriction in the airflow pathway, and the shape of the finns, but on average...) as an 80mm fan running at 3,000 RPM's.
Also, using the built in fan grill in your case (the ones they just punch out small holes in a pattern the shape of 60 or 80mm fan) is the worst thing you can do, even if you are going to use default sizes. You should always dremel out the built in grill and use a standard wire grill rather than those fancy air restricting/turbulence creating grills.
Then use a 5400RPM Hard drive. If you want to blow money you can even get a heatpipe cooler for your hard drive that screws into a 5.25in bay with rubber washers, and isolates the HDD from the case. Then the heatpipes keep the drive cool. This works up to even with 10krpm drives. But I use 7200RPM's on my desktop systems.
That is the basics. On top of all this you can do even more: Rubber washers between each fan and the case to prevent oscilations. If you use 2 identical fans, don't allow them to both run at the same voltage, as they will give you a beating effect because they will never spin at EXACTLY the same rate (unless you buy expensive computer controlled fan regulators which are only available in servers). Put a rubber washer between the power supply and the back of the case before screwing it in. Then put thin padding on all the joints of the case (like where the side pannel touches the rest of the case). This will dampen the oscillations throughout the case, and regulate all oscillations to be contained in a single pannel, rather than the entire case.
There is much more you can do, but this post is getting long. You handy people should get modding. You don't have to be fancy and rice out your case with glowing lights to be a case modder. I don't, and my mods are what draws the attention when my friends compare computer systems with eachother. They just don't see how I can pack the fastest video card, the fastest CPU, and the best everything in such a small case, overclocked, and still keep it quieter than a Mac G5.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
As I'm sure we all know, upgradability is a big issue with computer hardware. My MythTV box is using a Cooler Master case (but in black), with this motherboard.
I've already added a DVB-T (HDTV in the US) card, which you can't do with this box (i.e. you will never get digital TV with this box).
My box is a bit bigger, but looks like a stereo component (brushed steel). I'm also planning on adding an extra analogue capture card (bringing my capture sources up to three). This will fill the PCI slots on the Micro-ATX board, so I'm damn glad I didn't buy a smaller box!
I've got a DVD-ROM drive, DVD burner and currently one 160GB hard disk. Planning on adding another much bigger hard drive (waiting, waiting, I want 1TB)
If you are thinking of building a PVR (it's a fun project), you really should think about expandability and upgradability.
Also check Jarod's PVR Hardware Database, and his excellent Install Guides page.
Also, don't forget MythTV is a very nice client/server architecture, so you can run your "backend" on some beefy ugly PC in a cupboard, and us anything (including an XBox) as a frontend.
--
"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
-- Henry Mencken
My blog: http://yi.org/blog, Latest entry : Muscle powered microrobot's
As the above mentioned computer doesn't seem to actually have HDTV capabilites I'd like to point out this site.
http://www.pchdtv.com/
Linux HDTV cards for under $200. Sweet.
--Greg
Granted, I now have a PVR-250 and a PVR-350 in my MythTV machine, but I started out with dual BT878 capture cards (a Pinnacle PCTV Rave and a Hauppauge WinTV/Radio).
Although the picture quality of the PVR-x50 cards are better, I would argue that MythTV actually runs better on the BT8x8 cards, only because the ivtv driver is a bit unstable still.
The two main reasons why everybody raves about the PVR-250 cards (and thus tends to go with them) under MythTV are:
1. The graphics quality is SO much better. Even when you crank up the resolution on the BT8x8 cards to 720x480, there's still a noticable difference in picture quality (although, this could be due to the software codecs).
2. While giving this amazing picture quality, the bulk of the work is done on the PVR-x50 card. Thus, the main CPU remains free for other things.
I can speak from first hand experience, trying to do a dual-tuner system using BT8x8 cards really chews up CPU power. If you have the settings set up too high, and you end up recording two things at once (watching Live TV counts as a recording), then you'll end up dropping frames in the second recording (stuttering). The PVR-x50 eliminates all of these worries (assuming you have a motherboard that can handle the DMA traffic).
-- Joe
Come on people, when reviewing a piece of hardware, get the story straight. This box does NOT have an hdtv tuner, it has a plain old analog tv tuner but can output to an HDTV. Those are two very different things. Now, if someone can show me a box that includes an HDTV tuner as well I would be highly interested.
On that note -- I seem to remember WinTV having a WinTV-D product out a while ago. Does anyone know what happened to it ? It could to Digital TV (not quite HDTV but better than ATSC)
I feel that I should point out a couple of things for anybody considering getting a PVR-350 for Linux at the moment:
1. Even though the PVR-350 has TV-Out on it, AFAIK, you'll still need a regular video card in your PC (I don't think that motherboard BIOS' will recognize the PVR-350 as a video card, though I may be wrong on that).
2. PVR-350 TV-Out at the moment isn't that great. Last I heard, it's just a framebuffer, so unless you're running specific apps that will use the acceleration, like mplayer, MythTV (for watching MPEG-2 recordings only, I think), and maybe Xine, it's extremely slow. And for applications that require some sort of GL support, well, forget it (people have had numerous troubles with the MythGame module/XMAME)..
3. Apparently there's some issues regarding using the PVR-350 to record, and using the TV-Out at the same time.
However, your advice is still sound. I bought a PVR-350, and at the moment, I'm using it as a PVR-250, using my GeForce 4MX for TV-Out. Once the ivtv driver stabilizes, I'll switch to the PVR-350. There's been a lot of traffic on the ivtv mailing list lately with patches for testing and the like.
-- Joe
If you are a Windows user, check out GBPVR. Really very good indeed, puts some of the commercial stuff to shame. Free at the moment, although the author has started taking donations.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
If I'm not mistaken it has USB ports on the front
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/usb_data.htm
Just get the drivers...
It actually supports 1080i, 720p (yes, p), 480i and 480p (what the SiS folks call "525p" and "525i" respectively.)
And spend the rest on beer, or a lifetime subscription.
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/imagine/TIVO.dsp
And hey, you'll have something that "just works" from the word go, instead of having to fuck about for 3 weeks and still not be up to scratch. Face it, the tivo guys did a better job than you can.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Um. Your numbers are a bit misleading, although that of course doesn't change the value of your story. USB 1.1, which I assume you were using since you're talking about "the past" and USB 2.0 is rather recent, has a max bandwidth of 12 megabits/second. That's 1.5 megabytes/second, of course. PCI, on the other hand, starts out as a 33 MHz bus that is 32 bits wide, for a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 133 megabytes/second. Thus, "raw PCI" is roughly 90 times faster than USB 1.1. Just wanted to point that out, since factual errors of this nature tend to annou the anal geek within. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Right now, it all depends on how much patching you're willing to do.
;-)
I build MythTV from the RPMs that are done by Axel Thimm, which are linked to in Jarod's MythTV website. From what I have read on the MythTV mailing list, there are some issues with X/MythTV on the PVR-350 TV-Out. From Jarod's own website (which might be a bit dated):
General notes and observations from my first few days of using the PVR-350's TV-Out:
* mplayer WILL play back movies through the 350's tv-out, but the processor has to do all the decoding and the sound has to go through your sound card. However, even on an Athlon XP 2400 system, video playback isn't entirely smooth (for high-quality divx rips). Better support for the 350 as an output device is slated for a future mplayer release.
* Trying to use MythGallery locked up the frontend, MythDVD suffers from the same problems as mplayer (until you use a patched mplayer, which I haven't yet tried). I haven't yet tried MythGame or MythMusic.
* On many TVs, the picture is heavily overscanned. I haven't yet tried tweaking the XF86Config mode to see if I can reduce it, though I've seen indications on the mythtv-users mailing list that this may not be something one should attempt. For reference, I'm currently having to manually specify a MythTV window size of something like 632x472, 40 pixel X offset, 8 pixel Y offset, to fit it to the screen. This will vary heavily from TV to TV.
* Thus far, I'm not seeing a monstrous difference between the 350's output and a GF4MX's output (both via SVid), but I would say the picture is a bit sharper in scenes with high motion (I see a soft edge to things w/the GF4MX that are very sharp w/the 350).
* I think the 350's picture is a touch sharper than when I'm feeding my HDTV a progressive-scan signal via my VGA->Component video adapter, but not by a huge amount. The adapter wins hands-down for me though, because of my large divx collection (both because of 350 playback issues and resolution), the far superior readability (yes, I occasionally web browse on it, occasionally use the shell on it, etc., and a progressive-scan signal is WORLDS better for that), and stability
* So far as stability, I hadn't had a single crash of my MythTV system in ages until introducing the 350. Generally, it works great, but I've froze up the frontend a number of times in a few days, caused two or three crashes of the backend (which is on an entirely different machine), and completely hard-locked the system twice (I've been hammering on it pretty good though). At the moment, I'm back to using the output on my GeForce 4 MX, because I'll take stability over a slight picture quality improvement any day. The 350 was slaughtering the high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) MythTV had been enjoying for some time.
Myself, I use the IVTV driver with very few problems, using both the PVR-250 and PVR-350 as hardware encoders (but use a GeForce 4MX for TV-Out). My MythTV machine stays on 24/7, and I don't really run into too many problems. The most annoying problem right now (and I'm not sure if it's IVTV, MythTV or lirc) is that if I was recording something on card 1, and watching TV on card 2, when I change channels on card 2 (after card 1 is finished recording), then I get all sorts of stuttering problems. But, if I exit TV, and restart it, then all is fine.
If I understand things correctly, the "stable" branch of IVTV is being maintained by other developers while the main developer(s) go on with the 0.2 branch, which should fix most of the issues.
For now, my recommendation is go for it, but unless you feel like putting in patches, then use it as a PVR-350, and just wait.
I can't answer the question about DVD playback, because I haven't configured my PVR-350 for DVD playback.
-- Joe
I'd be pretty amazed if a typical LCD iMac ever uses even half that. They're not substantially different from an iBook G4, which pulls a little under 10W ideally, 15W typically, and around 25W max. The iMac has a larger display and somewhat brighter backlight, a 3.5" hard drive, and it does have a DVD burner, but even so I'd guess 50W is a heavy load. The 130W figure is probably more about engineering tolerance than real-world use.
I'd also note that you're unlikely to use some power-hungry subsystems together - burning (or even playing) a DVD or CD while playing a 3D game, for instance. A lot of people do have an iPod charging and/or an external Firewire drive being powered, though (an extra watt or so).
Anyone have one on a UPS and can report?