Slashdot Mirror
Step By Step: Building a MythTV PVR for $635
hesby writes "Anandtech has just published the first half of a two-part article on building a MythTV PVR that they will ultimately compare with Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition on very similar hardware. As a result, they selected some components that the average user might not choose, just to keep things fair in the second part, where they pit the two PVRs head to head."
You can buy a TiVo for $99.
So just for comparison, a low end brand new TiVo is $99 after rebates. A lifetime service contract is $299. The total is there for about $400. That's still about $250 under what the box in the article is. For that extra money you could get a 140 hour TiVo and still have $50 to spend on something else.
Or, if you have DirecTV, you can buy a DirecTiVo for about $100 and monthly service is $5 on top of your DirecTV bill. So that $650 will buy you the lowest end DirecTiVo and 110 months of service (about 9 years). DirecTiVos are wonderful machies, and can record two things at once, and it's all pure digital. I don't know the prices, but for $650 you could probably get a HD-DirecTiVo and a few months of HD/TiVo at least.
All that said, check out MythTV. If you already have parts on hand, it would be cheaper. It's a fun little project that can do tons of stuff, and there is no DRM (always a /. favorite). It was facinating watching the development list when I did. At that time they were discussing (and testing) ways of automaticaly skipping commercials, and it was very interesting to read. They talked about blank frame detecting (but you have to be careful so you don't miss a Simpsons's "eyeball" scene), using time (commercials come at fairly regular intervals), "bug" detection (the logo in the corner), etc.
MythTV can also show you weather, they were working on DVD and video playing as I remember, and MP3 playback. Plus you can have different frontend and backend boxes which would allow for very cool things.
All that said, if you just want a DVR, a TiVo is probably better. If you want your own Home Theater PC that can do all sorts of stuff and you want to be able to extend it yourself, check out MythTV.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
TiVo is actually Linux based. So this isn't the First Linux DVR.
you can get TiVo source code at:
http://tivo.com/linux/linux.asp
if you're interested in building your own PVR, you should take a look at EFF's broadcast flag page:
http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/
in less than a year, it will no longer be possible to buy a PC/HDTV decoder that is free of broadcast flag restrictions.
something to think about...
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
The pvr-250 encodes the video to mpeg2 on the fly and uses very little processing power (less than 5% cpu per pvr-250 on my machine).
Mythtv can re-encode the mpeg2 files into other formats in the background once a recording has completed. Mythtv nices the re-encoding processes down so they don't impact much of anything else on the box.
I have a 700MHz duron w/ 2 pvr-250's and have no trouble at all recording two programs at a time while re-encoding in the background.
If your antenna reception is poor, you need to use higher bitrates. All of that fuzz is going to compete with the actual show for bits, so you need to provide more.
When the signal is nice and clean, you can lower the bitrate.
For example, good luck using a Mac to record a digital HDTV broadcast to Xvid with a mu-law soundtrack and subtitles in Farsi, storing it to a network file server attached via IP-over-1394.
Good luck? It would be easier to do on a mac than a Linux box. Anything you can't find a native OS X app for, you can usually grab the unix tools and install to fill in the gaps. And you never have to recompile the kernel to get your hardware to work.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Or... you could just buy an ethernet-ready, autoconfiguring ReplayTV for around $400 (lifetime) or less from eBay, boot up the free software Java-based DVArchive (works on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/Xp, Linux, Mac OSX 10.2.3 or later, Solaris, etc), and schedule, share, and distribute your content over your LAN or across the Internet at will. In this context, the ReplayTV box works like as a really very loosely coupled capture device with its own extensive on-board command set that can be driven remotely by the DVArchive program, either at a console or using a web browser. And unlike the Tivo's inferior HMO option, the DVArchive system costs nothing and is unemcumbered by DRM. Some select ReplayTV models even feature automatic commercial skipping (using associated XML content metatags) and let you download content from a library of several tens of thousands of shows stored on a wide distributed ReplayTV network. More info here or here.
Da Blog
Like this. In fact, these are the guys that Aussie home brew MythTV builders get the programming info from.
I have used all three: Tivo, ReplayTV, and Myth. For my money, I choose ReplayTV hands down. I currently own 2 of them.
Replay TV is about the same price as a Tivo. And unless I haven't seen the latest version of Tivo yet, you still can't easily get the vids off of your Tivo and onto a PC. With Replay TV, it is easy. Use a piece of software called DVArchive.
And yes, you can share recordings with other ReplayTV's of the same (or similar) model. Yes, you can program it over the web (my.replaytv.com I think it is, I never use it personally)
You can buy a good ReplayTV 5040 unit on Ebay for about $300 last I checked. This model has automatic commercial skip, and 30 second skip if you prefer to do it manually. I have one of these models and it kicks the crap out of my cousin's Tivo simply because I can network it with the 10/100 port on the back and get stuff off of it and onto my PC.
Lastly, if you want a bigger hard drive, there are instructions for installing dual 160 GB drives out there on the internet. I personally have plenty of room on my 40GB drive since I can archive to my PC.
Tivo I give a 7/10, Myth I give a 6/10 (mostly because it is more tedious to set up and lacks the all around neatness in the entertainment center) and I give ReplayTV 9/10. I do wish they had the thumbs up/down type thing Tivo has.
There are good reasons for having many distros. This is one of them.
The point was that the TiVo is a simple to use device that is based on Linux, and is widely used by the unwashed masses. The parent concluded that Linux isn't ready for the mainstream by citing parts of an article about custom building a machine from scratch, while ignoring the counterexample of consumer-oriented products already using Linux.
Well, my bad for not reading your comment a bit closer before posting. One would think though that on a story about custom buiding a Linux PVR system, you'd comment on, well, a custom-built Linux PVR system.
We all know TiVos are easy to use and based on Linux, but that's not the subject of this story or what the original poster was commenting on.
The fact remains that if you want to achieve what the story is concerned with, and build a custom solution, you have to go through a lot of needlessly complex configuration that should really be automated in some fashion by now.