Slashdot Mirror
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?"
With a Pentium IV and a fast system bus, I would expect this thing to draw a lot of power. When I went from an Athlon based system to an iMac, my power bill dropped by almost ten bucks a month. I'd hate to see it spike from a set top appliance.
But for now at least we still have to put up with either a rather large Media PC, one that doesn't quite fit in with the other components of your home theater I mean, or whatever PoS companies like Sony want to jam down our throats this model year.
So to make a long story short I would like to see a Computer that looks, and feels, like a super slim DVD player, and Runs Linux. Not too much to ask I think, and then I would be able to do as I please with it.
Disclaimer: If something like this actually exists please let me know about it. I have, after all, been living in the middle of nowhere northern BC for about 19 years.
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
Like I said... Middle of nowhere...
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
In the spirit of the "second generation of homebrew PVRs", I was wondering...
Since I travel a lot I have recently been thinking about putting together a PVR-type device for my automobile. With ever-shrinking form factors, hiding the device would be no problem. A simple remote control would be fairly easy to integrate. Several fast-booting distro's come to mind to use as starting points. But before I jump in headfirst, I thought I would ask... has this been done before?
(I remember an article a few days abo about a totally "wired" automobile, but that's not my goal. Just a simple mass-storage device with access controlls, integrated with a car stereo. )
-B
The MythTV software was good enough; SageTV is better. (Pro-Myth: Video preview in Channel Guide. Pro-Sage: File-naming format, smarter EPG fetching, better EPG data, smarter file-naming format, smarter interfaces, smarter favorites/don't like, smarter conflict resolution, smarter channel guide).
The IVTV driver would lock up after 12 or 15 hours. That was with Kernel 2.6; probably should have stuck with kernel 2.4.
Plus it was just torturously harder to use. I have switched to Windows 2000 + SageTV for my Hauppauge PVR-250, with the Hauppauge MVP for watching the movies on TV. It is much better than a Tivo or ReplayTV or Myth. It rocks.
As for the noise produced by ASUS DIGIMatrix system, I have to stress that it is very low compared with the level of noise generated by regular desktops or "cubic" mini-systems. Even when the fans rotate at their maximum, the noise level never goes beyond 30dB. For your information: the regular desktop systems generate about 50dB of noise. 50db? That seems pretty loud for a pc... I know mine runs around 40 and it still gets pretty damn annoying during a movie when there is the all-too-pivotal silent scene right at the end. You need some other kind of cooling in there, like water cooling with a no-moving-parts pump. Fan noise is one of the big things that ruins media center PCs now.
Furthermore, by purchasing an XBOX without actually buying games you make MS lose money :) (they're losing money anyway with xbox, but this way they're losing even more)
These days it doesn't even take a screwdriver to hack the XBOX ... The (albeit kludgy) software solution works well.
The Raven
No, what Intel has is ease of use. My Dell Centrino book took less than a minute to configure/reconfigure, for anywhere I went, not to mention it was much less obtrusive than the drivers that DLink included, which ran a utility that not only threw up ugly errors if my signal was shit, but had an ugly splash screen and caused this odd hard drive clicking at the weirdest of times (when the card woke up from sleeping is my only guess). No, I feel that Intel did great justice, and with their support in trying to make a linux driver, I see even more reason to be happy where I am.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Yahoo! offers free TV listings, they wouldn't notice a huge increase in traffic if MythTV users switched over, and creating a scraper for their site is not really hard. And, for all I know, there are another dozen portals out there that MythTV users could head to if they got shut down.
As a matter of fact, scrapers are pretty easy to create (well, if you're a programmer and you know Perl), and easy to create in such a way that it's not too likely you'll be caught. (Caveat coder! Possible TOS violations lurk, so think through whatever you want to do before you do it.)
While I understand the geek lust for such a device, my two Replays (refubs bought from the Replay site with lifetime subscriptions included) and a DVD player covers all of my entertainment purposes flawlessly. The Replays are networked and can stream video from my PC. The DVD player can play DVDs, CDs, and MP3s. I rarely need to play anyother type of media, which I can already play on regular PC hooked up to my stereo system. It seems unecessary (and maybe more expensive and time consuming) to replace these devices that do their job very well, with a PC that can do it all.
Personally, the integrated Music Player, TV recorder/viewer, web interface(and this is the killer app for me) for scheduling recordings make the hassles worth it. Even bought myself a JP1 remote that I reprogrammed so it controls everything seemlessly so my girlfriend faction has increased greatly in the past month or so.
Getting back to the Ahanix cases, they have several different models with different sizes most with a LCD display(HD44870) that can be used by mythtv if you have lcdproc installed. If you are looking for a HTPC, check them out.
This looks promising.. Apex makes cheap stuff of decent quality, and the specs on this look promising.
Basically what the Phantom plans to be (which is why I dont doubt the Phantom will exist). I predict tons of dvd-form-factor PCs marketed as PC/Console/PVR/etc...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
What's the deal with that? 1080i, 720i, 525i (what the hell is that anyway?!)... 1080i's pretty common, but I can't remember the last time
:-\
I've ever seen a 720i source or 525i for that matter.
I'd really like to see a device with DVI/Component INPUTS so you can use the tuner most cable companies provide with their HDTV service.
It's a cold day in hell when you can pick up a decent HDTV signal with just an antenna around here.
If I recall at CES this year there were at least 2 HDTV sets with built-in PVR capabilities, and they could record HDTV content.
Now that really tickles my fancy, unfortunately your options for getting the recorded content off your TV's PVR are limited
$999 for an HDTV-VHS recorder (i.e. JVC HM-DH30000 ) is a little high. Seems the PC hardware approach might not be a bad idea,
ATI has new HDTV tuner hardware on the horizon. If you couple that with a huge hard drive, I'm sure you could potentially beat the over-priced JVC product by a long shot.
I know I'd certainly jump at the opportunity to buy such a device.
Unfortunately, this device isn't quite there yet. But it looks like a step in the right direction (given a decent non-proprietary PVR software environment).
But how long do we really have before TiVo and Replay embrace HDTV recording? Replay already has S/PDIF and Component OUTPUTs (even though they only have analog inputs)...
Geeze how much longer do I have to hear about video cards with TV Tuners. All I need is channel 4 since all channel selection HAS TO BE through either a sat or cable box.
A agood IR blaster would turn my PC into a programmable "universal remote".
When will ATI and NVIDIA get a clue?
The CoolerMaster ATX-620 fits nicely in my audio rack. Relatively quiet, one discrete blue LED indicator, black brushed aluminum.
The breakdown:
Before I was serious about building this box, I decided to see how much of a task it would be to implement it. I picked up a very cheap, no-name video capture card at a local computer show. The box said it used the Brooktree 878 chipset -- one I remembered was well supported by the Video4Linux project. And the price was right for experimentation at US$40. I took it home and installed it on a crappy Pentium 166 I had lying around. I installed the card and Mandrake 8.2 and started playing with the card using XawTV. The I/O and speed limitations of that system kept it from being overly useful as a recorder, but it proved to me that the project was viable and that the equivalent of a second generation Pentium processor could probably do the job adequately.
As someone who has spent more time on eBay than I care to remember, I naturally started looking for viable hardware there. I found this strange little Hewlett Packard "built for Unisys" PC which is about 1 foot square and about 3.5 inches tall. It features a Sahara-II motherboard and had most of the hardware I needed built into the standard box. I added a mouse and keyboard and the TV capture card and I was ready to start building a solution. It started out as a 300 MHz Celeron with 32 MB of memory, but I decided to fork over another US$30 or so and make it 400 Mhz and 96 MB. It actually worked before the upgrade, but the CPU seemed to be at its edge and I didn't want to use KDE with so little memory.
I set up the system to autologin to a passwordless user called (appropriately) "tv." I capture the programs into a subdirectory called (strangely enough) "shows."
The recording rate of the TV capture card appears to max out at 15 frames per second. If I were intending to archive these programs forever, I'd probably invest in a better card. But for timeshifting shows like the evening news from France (for my wife) and The Red Green Show (for me), 15 fps is adequate.