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Building the Godzilla of PVRs
EvolvedHumanoid writes "In a blog post, Percy Bell of SnapStream Media details how he built 'Godzilla', an 11-tuner PVR machine with HDTV support using off-the-shelf components. At $4284.90, the end result sports 1TB storage for recorded content and has to be one of the coolest PVRs ever built."
Blog already slow (database connection error at first try), following mirrors had time to do their job :
MirrorDot
and nyud.net
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
We have a new winner...
The old king was a 45 year old 350lb man who spent his days in his parents basement watching porn and playing WoW pretending to be a 16 year old girl.
But these guys that built an 11 tuner PVR becasue they just couldnt get enough porn blow right past 11 on the loser scale.
Please find your nearest suicide booth, ASAP.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
They do if you already have hardware laying around. For instance, I have a couple of AthlonXP 1800's sitting around, so I'm considering building a PVR out of them. The fact that they're on NForce2 motherboards with SoundStorm and SPDIF out doesn't hurt, either.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
In building several-terabyte arrays from IDE drives - with dedicated fans blowing right over the drives, and HUGE fans ventilating the case - I've found that when you're talking about nearly a dozen drives, it's not long before you're going to have a failure. In large arrays of Maxtors, Seagates, and Western Digitals, I have yet to go a year without at least one drive failing.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, one of my Western Digital RAID edition drives started hiccuping, and got dropped out of an array. That particular set of drives has only been in service for about 4 months.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It's not open source, unfortunately, but has a very active development guy and a very good plug-in architecture.
My PVR is an AMD Sempron 2200+ with 768MB RAM, 360GB Hard drive space, two Hauppauge tuners (250 and 150-MCE) running in a small case on a Chaintech 7NIF2 board running Win2000. Everything works flawlessly and my wife loves it! She records all her shows and watches them whenever she wants. I've got about half of our DVD collection ripped and converted to Xvid sitting on there, ready to go (those discs aren't getting anywhere near the kids!) and everything is awesome.
When we move into our house, I'm going to run network through the walls and have a Hauppauge Media MVP as a small, quiet front-end in the bedroom.
The PVR itself is fairly noisy, but when the TV's on, you can't hear it so it doesn't really matter. When I do an upgrade, I might get another MVP and put the main server into the closet.
I originally tried MythTV (using KnoppMyth), but after a week of hassle and wrestling with it, I gave up and tried GB-PVR. I haven't tried MythTV since. I'd like to have only open-source, free software running, but I couldn't get it to work. I hope to be able to switch over in the future, but for right now, we're quite happy.
The Kerr Divine: My wife's battle with a mysterious illness.
Snapstream built a box with 10 tuners a while ago. http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/hydra /default.asp They used five Hauppauge PVR-500MCE cards which each have two tuners.
These guys used an odd mix: 3x Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500, 1xAnalog PCIe Tuner: PowerColor, and 4x Digital HDTV Tuners.
So I guess the 3 analog cards are 2 tuners each, then the other analog tuner, and 4 HDTV via USB = 11.
Spinal Tap would be proud.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I was using KnoppMyth. For some reason, the function of "don't record if the disk is full" has never been turned on, or else never worked. I sure couldn't find docs about it, and queries to knowledgeable Myth Advocates were mostly responded to with "just update to the latest CVS" which...is not what I'm looking for. After the most recent round of "I don't have enough time to watch everything I record" filled up the partition AND trashed the database, I gave up. TiVo is in my future.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I know you're joking, but really, it wouldn't work - because they already have kickass PVRs. That Sony beast has 11 tuners (1 sat, 10 analog broadcast), 1 Gig RAM, 1 TB HDD, built-in streaming server (WLANa/g, LAN), DVD+-R/RW/RAM - all for 27,9800 yen, or $2,421.88. Oh, and it has an Intel Pent-D 820 and GeForce 6200(256MB).
Or This thing, which I think is a pure PVR with no PC, 8 tuners, (Cable and broadcast), up to 2 TB HDD, $776.95.
Somehow, I doubt they need to import giant jerry-rigged American PVRs.
oh, and why is it that Japan makes products that are *so* much more attractive looking than American ones? Only Apple seems to match them in aesthetics...
BeyondTV does use quite a bit of CPU just to do the commercial skipping scan after a program is recorded. If you have 11 shows recording at once, it'll take quite a bit of CPU to scan through all that content to remove commercials. I have a P3 and while everything works great, the comskip scanning gets behind after a while because the CPU can't keep up.
Some defense of choices:
Dual Core/Dual CPU - any thread or process can be split off onto the additional cores (ok, with some OS limitations), so having multiple of them is a good thing to handle writes and reads from all those tuners. Disk reads/writes are one of the worst processor eating functions (though caching helps), as they have one of the longest pipelines and tend to stall it. Windows itself doesn't do threading well (at least to use up extra CPU/cores), but extra processes will benefit from the additional CPUs.
RAID 0 - is fastest. yes, for safety I'd probably favor RAID 1+0, but for raw speed RAID 0 is best.
file system... er, yeah I'd probably choose something other than NTFS personally, but if the apps depended on Windows, NTFS is the best choice.