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Building the Godzilla of PVRs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the because-you-can dept.

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."

3 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Software by thebosz · · Score: 5, Informative
    If you'd like a free PVR, I personally like GB-PVR. It can handle as many tuners as your machine can handle plus it has a bunch of additional features. Beyond TV, Sage TV and Microsoft MCE all cost money, but none of them do anything that GB-PVR can't.

    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.
  2. Re:Manufacturer's Warning: by identity0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  3. Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built? by Slayback · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.