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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.
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
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.
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?
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.