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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."
Sheesh, it seems to take me at least fifteen minutes to get everything out of the boxes! Then I spend another fifteen putting the case together, a few more mounting the motherboard, more if I drop a screw and it gets caught in some cranny somewhere. I suppose these guys have done it alot, but that seems to be pushing it.
Hell, why does the machine need such a fast processor? Does it automatically re-encode on the fly? And if not, why not just throw a cheaper Athlon XP in it and call it a day, cutting a good hundred bucks off the price.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Ridiculous.
When we want something, we usually exchange something called "money" for what we want. We have money, which really isn't any good for anything except getting other things you want.
And someone else has a TiVo service, which they want to give some someone with money. They can't eat TiVo service, after all.
So, we both do something called an "exchange". We give them the money, and they give us the TiVo service. This is not a one-sided transaction. We had money which we didn't want, but the other person did. They had some TiVo service, which they can't eat, but can give to us in exchange for the "money" that they can use to get something to eat from someone else. To say that it's cornholing, or flagpole rape is just a little ridiculous.
So as I said, it's not a one-sided deal. Both parties of this exchange of "money" for "TiVo service" benefit. In fact, usually both parties are so pleased at the exchange from which both of them benefitted, that they say "thank you" to each other at the conclusion of the deal.
So buy the damn TiVo service and qwitcherbitchin.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Dont forget the monthly subscription sharges for the Tivo service.
I haven't paid a monthly fee to Tivo in almost 5 years.
ah but that's after rebate =)
/. OSS zealots would be more into a TRUE OSS HTPC than the linux-based but mostly propietary/locked up (series 2) TiVo box).
Tivo's are great (I love mine), but I really like the flexibility of rolling my own ( so much so I put up a community dedicated to building your own PVR )
DIY is MORE about control and creativity than it is about saving a buck (you'd figure the
Although if you are creative with existing components you can build a tivo-esque workalike pretty cheap.
And don't forget our tinfoil hat paranoid faction, who would rather have control of who or which company's get our viewing habit data (anonymized/aggregated or not).
*shrug* YMMV
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
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.
Hmmm...This article seems to have nearly what you're asking for. And it's nearly six months old. As for storing it to a network file server attached via IP over Firewire, you don't think the company that invented Firewire knows how to make that work? Think again buddy. And I'll second what somebody else already said about yer 2-1337-4U attitude -- there's a reason why the computer dweeb is typically looked down upon in society...
To all the "Just buy a tivo " people - yes, if that works for you, go for it.
Unfortunately, in many countries, Tivo is not an option.
Tivo is also not quite as flexible.
- Use a PVR-250 for encoding.. heck, get two. The onboard mpeg encoder is definately worth it.
Think of it as a general purpose home PC.... I built a mythtv box for my folks.. it has xvids, records tv shows, does the weather, lets them browse photo albums (which is great when they have friends over).. it's accessible over SSH so I can upload new shows / videos / pictures to them, as well as record some of my favorite shows and download them (I live in another country.)
They use it to listen to streaming mp3 over the stereo when they have friends over playing poker...
Now, sure you can do all that with a PC.. yup. The point is to have this PC that's geared towards your home entertainment center rather than your desktop.. with an interface so simple an adult can use it, and a geek can tinker behind the scenes endlessly.
It's called a lifetime subscription. Those of us who bought in back when the subscription was $99 got a great deal. I own 4 tivos, and they all have lifetime service on them. Cheaper in the long run.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
I built my own MythTV box for around $250. Athlon 2400(about $100 with motherboard), GeForce 4 MX something or other ($20 from a friend that was selling his), 80 GB HD (around $30), some WinTV tuner card ($20 on froogle), 512 MB of RAM (pretty sure I got that for around $50) and a $20 case and power supply. The NIC and sound were built in to the motherboard and I just borrowed a CD drive from an existing computer for the install, so I don't think I left anything out.
Hardly a high end system these days, but it's more than sufficient for a PVR. 80 GB will get around 100 hours of video using MPEG4.
The parent poster may be a lamer that paid a lifetime subscription, but the proper way is some not-so-easy-to-google perl scripts, that scrape guide data off of tvguide.com and format it for the Tivo.
Nice when you have more than one, in that a computer under your direct control can manage it as if there is more than one. Who wants 3 tivo's all recording the same damn thing? Besides, some things like C band tv, just aren't supported by Tivo.
Yes, codecs change fast, but when you can offload 95% of the work the box would be doing, that's nothing to sneeze at.
Besides, you could record in MPEG2, and use your now free CPU time to do the transcoding (which you can also do when nothing is being recorded). That way you get the instant gratification of having things recorded small (and your CPU could handle 2 or 3 recordings at once as long as the HD could) and you could run a low priority cron job to transcode things when nothing else is going on so you get the space advantage.
But if you plan to backup (or just copy) onto DVDs (which are MPEG2), then recording in MPEG2 makes even more sense (because you wouldn't need to transcode to make a disc that would play in any player).
As for the Athlon 64, yes it could handle one or two encodes in real time, but with a RAID and a few cards, you could record 4 or 5 streams with hardware encoding. Also, MythTV supports multiple front/backends. That means you can take your old PII 233, stick a PVR-250 in it, and with a little setup it would look like an extra tuner to your main MythTV box. That would only cost you $99 or the card. Your idea would require a much faster computer.
The ideal solution would be some very fast ASIC/DSP/PGA that you could configure on the fly to do hardware encoding of any format, but that probably won't show up for years.
Also note that a hardware encoding chip does the work much more efficently (in terms of electricity used and heat produced) than a general purpose processor like a P4 or Athlon 64.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to look around more before committing to any video hardware (I'm used to building servers, so I'm in foreign waters here).
Like the AC said, shipping is usually free if you don't mind waiting a little longer. I think of it as turning patience into money.
I'm mostly using Newegg to get a feel for what's out there anyway; when I actually break ground on this thing, I'll spend some more time hunting out the cheapest prices. (I guess I could've skipped a step on done this all on PriceWatch, but there's some shady shit on there; do I want a "House Brand" motherboard from some guys operating out of a pickup truck with the engine running?)
No problem. Clearly, this thing'll be built to outlast the cockroaches, what with buying criteria like "cheap" and "adequate" and "I dunno." I don't think you'll be laughing so hard when my PVR has to rebuild civilization.
People blow money on expensive gaming rigs all the time when Sony and Nintendo are a step away from selling their consoles out of gumball machines. Value is subjective. If I want to spend extra cash on vendor independence, built-in MAME, hardware I know better than my immediate family, etc., then it's no skin off your ass. Hell, building computers in general is wasted capital when Dell and HP will give you a top-of-the-line PC, display, printer, and 24-hour support line with some confused Hindu guy for about a month's rent. If I have to explain the value of wasting time and money building things for no apparent reason, then I need to find a geekier clique than this. Maybe switch to Hurd and move to Tibet. Shit, people.
Worst case scenario: I get bored watching Simpsons episodes one frame at a time, and my PVR transforms into a headless web server with a $100 video card.
Anyway, thanks for the advice, everyone. Keep it coming since I'm just making this up as I go along.
(Oh, and I meant 3.5 mm instead of 3.5" with regards to headphone jacks. NASA-itis.)
It's recommended to have about 1Ghz per encoder, so if you want to record two programs, and be able to watch something, you're going to need at least 3 Ghz. Even with this much power, though, there can still be glitches when viewing or recording due to load. However, with with two Hauppauges you can record two shows and watch something at the same time with the machine hardly ticking over.
It's not unheard of to have both a Happguage and a different TV tuner card in the box as well, for when you want to record straight to a format other than MPEG.
Also, many people choose to use a less powerful, but smaller, quieter, and cheap machine like a mini-ITX as a PVR. In this case, it's a requirement to use a Hauppauge if you want to watch and record at the same time.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Depends on if you want to watch TV in the same room as your box or not. An Athlon-64 outfit with all the fans necessary to run it won't be quiet without additional expense. Likewise, it won't be the tinest box either and, assuming you leave it on 24/7, it would eat a fair amount of power.
The PVR-250 offers onboard MPEG-2 compression which gets you decent quality and acceptable file sizes and you don't need your CPU to do all the work. It would be nice to save some of those cycles to use on playback of the recorded stream (which you'd need to do if watching live TV or a recorded program while your system was recording something else).
You might even sacrifice some of that extraneous processing power and build a fanless Mini-ITX system. No fan noise, lower power consumption, and a tiny box to amaze your friends and fool your enemies.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
It was ok to watch recorded shows on, but the quality was not as good as on a tivo. I used a Hauppauge PVR250 as my tuner and a Geforce FX400 with TV out as my TV connection, and the quality was nowhere near what the Tivo gets me. Not to mention it really sucks to come home after a few days away only to find that Myth had crashed.
Watching live tv pretty much sucked too, compared to tivo.
Also consider using Myth with a digital cable tuner or satellite tuner. Guaranteed not a simple task, just getting a IR blaster is hard, not to mention getting it to work with Myth.
I tried to play a DVD, and it worked somewhat OK. However suddenly the remote didn't work anymore, and I had to use the PC's keyboard to be able to stop the movie and get back to Myth (alt-tab)
I tried uploading MP3s to the Myth box since it has a player. Bad idea...the player crashed when trying to play them.
In the end, I took my 160G hard drive and 512M memory and stuck in my PC instead. I bought a 80G hard drive for $50 at Circuit City and stuck it in the Series1 Tivo I got on eBay for $50. Voila, I had what I needed. It just works, and records the shows I need. And it is much cheaper than a PC, while it does less it does about as much as what actually works in Myth.
The only thing I could wish was that the Tivo guys took a look at the Myth UI. The way they let you sort the recordings by show is excellent, while the Tivo list of recordings is a bit primitive.
The last time I checked the Series 2 tivos still suffered from LBA48 issues. I've been reading www.tivocommunity.com forums and I havent seen anyone mention a direct-from-tivo update to the software that allows LBA48 - people have hacked it of course, to allow for LBA48 support. But its far more substantial that just pluging in a new HD.
The whole DVDs-on-demand is the primary reason why it would be better to use a PC based PVR as opposed to a Tivo. If all you want is more TV, then get a Tivo.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I got a Tivo roughly 2 years ago (wasn't $99) and I purchased it because they had a special on the lifetime service for an even $100. Just after a year it broke. You have to fix the box you have, because you CAN NOT transfer service to another box, they have hard coded MAC address like ID numbers. Just sending the box in to be looked at would have been nearly $100 (out of the 1 year warranty), not to mention I would have had to pay shipping on top of that, both ways. Plus parts. I had a sony, and as soon as my brother heard he got me in touch with a friend of his who had similar problems. Turns out he had a phillips box that had a modem that went bad. Sent it in to have it fixed and it came back with a good modem, but the video card was damaged "in shipping", and phillips was going to charge him to have that fixed seperately. In the end it was obvious to me that Tivo's are designed to break or are just crappy pieces of equipment with semi-neat software feauters I never used anyway, so I went with the rental boxes built into satelite receivers.
As for that: I pay close $65 a month for 4 rental boxes in my house (not one Tivo to fight over) one of which is a 2 in one box that can record two progrmas at once and feed two seperate outputs at once as well. If they break, no problem and no extra charge. Boxes get old and I want new technology? I just pay a small fee per box to get newer upgraded boxes. End of story.
yeah. but then you need to factor in $20 or $30 for a tivo-compatible USB 802.11b adapter... but the reall killer app for Myth that TiVo just doesn't offer at all is the burn-to-dvd option included in the parent's spec.
Tivo lets you play stuff back through a VCR or standalone DVD-R, but that's a half-assed solution at best. The integrated TiVo + DVD-R boxes from e.g. Pioneer are over $500 for just the hardware. add $300 for lifetime service, and that MythTV box starts to look downright cheap.
why would you want to burn to DVD? well, because you might want to archive something on broadcast, or make copies to give to your friends. As a for-example, I'm on a masters' water polo team, and I'm fanatic about watching and playing polo. But there is never any polo on American TV... except during the Olympics! So yes, I went to Circuit City and bought a $99 TiVo with the 40-gig disk for the SOLE PURPOSE of recording olympic water polo matches. But guess what? Everybody on my team wants to watch them too, but since Tivo records the whole 8-hour block of programming, I had to delete some games from Tivo to make room for the next games. And I noticed something interesting- whatever algorithm Tivo uses to compress the video stream, it has some problems with water, especially at the lower quality settings... Often I could see rectangular divisions in the surface of the pool, and it's even worse on the VHS tapes I tried to make from the TiVo.
When you buy a Tivo, you're buying convenience, but if you also want to buy the ability to make archival copies on DVD, you're going to spend $500 on hardware either way... and then the MythTV box does save you money because you don't have to subscribe to get progam listings.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
You left out the price of the case/power supply. This ranges from about $40 up to $200 or so if you don't already have one. That Athlon XP processor with OEM fan requires either an additional exhaust fan set up to pull hot air away from the CPU, or a power supply with dual fans in it. You could use an all-copper cooler with a noisy, fast fan instead, though. Either way it's going to raise the price of the whole thing by about twenty bucks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why are all Hauppauge's cards 5v PCI? I have a really old 44801 that I can't use in my new Opteron machine because it only has 3.3v PCI slots. I looked at Hauppauge's current offerings and even their 350 is still 5 volt.
I wonder how the WinTV-PVR-usb2 is, and if it is supported in Linux?
The Happaugauge card is not only worth it because of the hardware encoding, but also because it has a far better tuner and digital converters than any of the bttv cards out there. I have a MythTV box with a bttv card and a pvr-250 and the 250 video is by far better quality. Less noise, better contrast etc. If you shop around you can get them OEM for 70 bucks, which is how much I paid for mine. Way better buy then the bttv card for 50 bucks.
Most of you forgot about the one cost that is hard to escape. Electricity is something you are going to be paying much more for with a homebuilt DVR. A Sempron based computer will probably draw ~250 watts of power on idle plus make loads of noise and not be very pretty. A Tivo draws under 100 watts, has a very quiet fan and looks great among DVD players, DBS receivers, Playstations, Xboxs, and amps. That comes out to almost $10 difference a month where I live in just extra cost to power that homebuilt DVR.
.09(Avg Cost Kilowatt = $9.72
150(Watt difference) * 24(Hours/day) * 30(Days/Month) / 1000(Find Kilowatts/hour) *
Do yourself a favor and just pay the monthly Tivo fee. You will end up paying about the same in monthly fees just to operate the two systems but the Tivo has a much lower initial investment, looks better, easier to use, and takes a whole 10 minutes to setup. That doesn't apply to people who are constantly archiving shows to DVD in which case a DVR would be easier but even on Tivo, it isn't difficult. I just hookup my MiniDV camcorder to the Tivo for that 1 or 2 shows a month I want copied and route that signal directly to my Firewire port (as opposed to copying to tape and then back out) and that directly to DVD (burning the disc out of Tivo in realtime). Try it sometime.
At home, I built a very small server for the house to use. It runs Debian, and I use it to power my thin client in the kitchen (for family calendaring and TV watching). I was able to install MythTV easily on the server and pop in a WinTV PVR 250 with relatively little hassle (I did one previously and knew what to expect). The benefit I get from MythTV is that I am able to watch TV on my Linux box in the den point the frontend to the server's backend. I think this is a great feature. Just my thoughts.