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."

Comments

Or

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy a TiVo for $99.

Re:Or

[Anonymous Coward]

$99 + $299 lifetime fee = still cheaper. Heck, you can replace the hard drive with a bigger one and still come out ahead.

Re:Or

[typhoonius]

You can buy a TiVo for $99.

The article argues that you'll save money by not having to pay TiVo a monthly fee. Besides, for some of us, building a cool machine is an end in and of itself.

Anyway, I tried pricing a MythTV box a couple of days ago with a goal of keeping it under $500, and this is what I ended up with (copied right out of the link above):

• CD/DVD drive ($52)--Combo CD and DVD-writer. DVD-recording isn't essential, so I might downgrade this to a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive.
• Hard disk drive ($99)--160 GB, S-ATA, very quiet. A P-ATA drive with the same buffer is nearly the same price.
• Video card ($109)--CATV in, composite out, works with Linux and FreeBSD. The only people who dislike it seem to be kids who want to play Doom III on it.
• Sound card--Onboard might be good enough for now with a $5 3.5"-headphone-to-composite-audio cable from Radio Shack.
• Processor ($65)--Athlon XP 2000+, cheap, adequate. Retail instead of OEM so I don't have to get a heatsink/fan separately.
• Motherboard ($53)--Micro-ATX, S-ATA, AGP 8x. Committed to MSI because a motherboard without Engrish just isn't a motherboard. Three PCI slots for wireless adapter, eventually a sound card, and I dunno, 1394?
• Memory ($76)--512 MB DDR333, cheaper than DDR266. Screw dual-channel.
• Case/power supply--Needs something that can fit the video card (guess that entails finding a mobo that horizontally orients expansion cards if I don't want a lame-o tower).
• Wireless adapter ($30)--802.11g, cheap, works with Linux and FreeBSD. Going wireless so it isn't stuck in the same room as the router (and no way I'm running cat-5 everywhere in 20-mother-fucking-04).

Subtotal: $484.

Still need a case--certainly won't be paying $100+ for one like the article did--and probably a sound card that isn't onboard crap. It probably won't make the $500 goal, but it looks alright (barring any major oversights on my part).

Re:Or

[MBCook]

Not a bad list, but you really should "splurge" on the Happguage PVR-250 card. It does the encoding in hardware, so even a low end box could easily support two tuners. With the card you put in your list, all the encoding would fall on the CPU. Not only that, I'm not sure that nVidia's personal cinema is supported under Linux. An integrated video card (on the motherboard) would do fine as long as it had TV out that was supported under Linux (and looked half decent). Wouldn't even need that if you used a monitor.

Re:Or

[dioscaido]

This LBA issue is resolved in Series 2 Tivo's (the one's they are selling for $99, or $89 if you go to Best Buy). I got mine up to 330 hours (two 160Gb drives). The sky is the limit at this point.

Certainly, the linux/windows PVR has the plus of being able to play other media and donwloaded movies. Although I can't imagine a full fledged linux TiVo interface hack isn't in the works already to permit this functionality (Tivos come with USB, and support ethernet networking).

Re:Or

[mercuryresearch]

I can only echo the advice for using a PVR-250 (actually I suggest the PVR-350, which is encode and decode).

I've got a MythTV box running on a VIA mini-ITX using the slowest CPU offered, a fanless 533 MHz C3 "Eden." With the PVR-350 it loafs along at sub 5% CPU loading. The only downside to this slow of a CPU is occasionally there's a lag in menu selections or screens that need to do a lot of database work to update, but given the power savings and the fact that the box can be fanless, it's worth it.

Even cooler, I was able to use MythMusic to rip all my CDs that had been living in a 200 CD changer -- now I've got on screen menu, random access to the collection with complete artist/title info, instead of having to look up that a favorite CD is #153 in the changer. And I can create any playlist I want with minimal effort.

Tivo doesn't do anything like this -- one more advantage for MythTV.

Start adding up the cost of consumer electronic devices a Myth box can potentially replace, and it doesn't take long to make a compelling argument based on expense alone.

Re:Or

[oliphaunt]

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.

Only 15 minutes to put hardware together?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

80GB?

[ElPresPufferfish]

80GB seems pretty weak when my normal recordings are 1GB/30min. I'm building a mythtv backend right now, and I'm looking for at least 1TB of space.

Just For Comparison

[MBCook]

I messed around with MythTV about a year ago. From what I could tell it was nice, but it wasn't usable for me (my computer was WAY underpowered for video encoding, which I knew going in). That said I've since gotten a DirecTiVo and I LOVE it.

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.

TiVo = A linux distro

[KB1GHC]

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

Broadcast flag coming up...

[stinkfoot]

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...

And this is why Linux is not mainstream

[spoco2]

This article shows why linux is not mainstream yet:
"We can attempt to load the card right now using the commands below:

# modprobe i2c-core
# modprobe i2c-algo-bit
# modprobe tuner type=2
# modprobe msp3400
# modprobe videodev
# modprobe saa7115
# modprobe ivtv"

And
"dmesg also reports success:

# dmesg | tail
[] sys_init_module+0xeb/0x1e0
[] sysenter_past_esp+0x52/0x79

ivtv: No mem on buf alloc!
ivtv: Buffer alloc failed!
ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, minor 0
ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, minor 32
ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, minor 224
ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, minor 24
ivtv: loaded "

Uh huh

"# cat /dev/video0 > /tmp/test.mpg" Of course, I should know that's how you record video...

And finally:
"And finally, after several hours of turmoil and despair, we have installed and tested our Linux device. Its far from perfect - we cannot readily work with digital TV broadcasts, for example."

It's for exactly these reasons that people use Windows and Macs... this sort of thing is far above the average Joe's understanding I'm afraid, and it really shouldn't be stuff they have to know as it's not user friendly, confusing and assumes far too much prior knowledge.

Re:And this is why Linux is not mainstream

[pyrrhonist]

Seems like you're only proving his point further here.

Well, I suppose so, if you count merciless ridicule as honest user testimony.

If you're so sure, then how about a real example of how average-user-friendly it is to setup, instead of taking the cop-out of basically saying "It's easy for me, how could it possibly be hard for anyone else?"

Fine. How to set up a TiVo:

1. Take you TiVo out of the box.
2. Oh and ah, then pet TiVo affectionately.
3. Put batteries in remote.
4. Connect cable wire to TiVo.
5. Set the channel switch on TiVo to "3".
6. Connect one end of red/white/yellow wire to TiVo and other end to TV.
7. Connect one end of phone cord to TiVo and other end to phone jack.
8. Plug in TiVo, turn it on, and turn on the TV.
9. Set the TV channel to "3".
10. Follow the on-screen instructions.
11. Record stuff.
12. Watch recorded stuff.
13. Drink beer. Eat chips.

See? Easy. No, recompile of the kernel was necessary.

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.

Re:And this is why Linux is not mainstream

[rjch]

"And finally, after several hours of turmoil and despair, we have installed and tested our Linux device. Its far from perfect - we cannot readily work with digital TV broadcasts, for example."

It's for exactly these reasons that people use Windows and Macs... this sort of thing is far above the average Joe's understanding I'm afraid, and it really shouldn't be stuff they have to know as it's not user friendly, confusing and assumes far too much prior knowledge.

However, as they pointed out in the article ("Opting for a different distribution that supports the PVR card natively would have been a better idea, but we have already gone this far...") they didn't pick the right distro. Had they chosen KnoppMyth, it would have worked damn near out of the box.

There are good reasons for having many distros. This is one of them.

ReplayTV + DVArchive - Simpler, Around Same Cost

[meehawl]

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.

Personal experience.

[mindstrm]

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.

Australian pre-packaged MythTV

[zbaron]

Like this. In fact, these are the guys that Aussie home brew MythTV builders get the programming info from.

They don't....

[AllenChristopher]

It's about instant gratification and control.

Want to watch that Seinfeld episode with the toothbrush? You can pull it up only if you have all 100 or so hours of Seinfeld stored.

You probably don't want to watch it yourself. You probably want to show it to someone else. "There was this great episode of such and such the other day, man, you should have seen it."

Call it an extension of memory. It's well worth reading what C.S. Lewis said about this in "Perelandra", and of course if the text were online I could link you to the right bit.

These sorts of people used to download a lot more music before the iTunes music store for the same reason. They want to be able to have any song, any time. Now you don't have to download the song until you want to hear it because you know the download will work.

The music packratting is starting to fall off... you don't stockpile every kind of snack just in case you have a craving because you trust 7-11. The video packratting is just getting started.

Tivo?? No way, get a ReplayTV

[jmcmunn]

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.

Re:same old feel'n, different skills

[HarveyBirdman]

You dads may have had skills to be a welder, carpender or even auto machenic. When he'd come home, he'd fix the car, make a coffee table, helb build a bird avery or build a varendah (patio?).

Yeah, but the car is pretty important, and home improvements have a retun on the investment of sweat equity.

I bought a Tivo despite being pretty damn tech savvy (I'm a hardware engineer AND software engineer BOW TO ME!) because, well, it's just friggin television. I use a DVR to reduce my time wasted on television.

The real satisfaction is in creating something original. The MythTV thing seems more like a Heathkit approach. Follow the directions and you're done.

For you young whippersnappers who don't know what a Heathkit was: http://www.heathkit-museum.com/

Excellent Documentation?

[elmegil]

I don't know what those reviewers are smoking. Don't get me wrong; I have a Myth box, and I like it a lot. The software itself rocks. But the documentation is a huge haystack of braindumps without a map. These guys put Myth onto a box in a relatively short period of time, modulo distribution problems. That sounds to me like they've read and reread and rereread the docs enough times that they know what's where--they've done it before and don't need a map any longer. For a first time Myth user, the docs are going to blow your brain into little pieces, and it's going to take you a long time just to absorb what's relevant to your system from them unless you have a really standard (i.e. just like the developers') machine.

Oh, by the way? I have a job already, and a family, and a life. So don't tell me it's my fault I can't digest the haystacks and make a map for the world. I'm a supporter of Myth, I'm just saying that the review does not set reasonable expectations for the effort it takes unless you're installing KnoppMyth.