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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."
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Pentium EE...dual core with htt...bad combination...very silly choice. FX-60 would be more impressive.
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
Is this the result of open source driving the price of software down? If this were a Microsoft product, just the word "Server" on the package would cost you an additional $300 or more.
That's a whole lot of heating being generated. Exhaust fan failure=lots of dead harddrives?
What about heat on the TV tuners? Or the video card?
Methinks one would be much better serviced by a rack of systems, this thing would run WAY too hot.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I always love to hear about stuff like this. However, good luck finding enough content worth recording. I have a PVR with 1 tuner and I struggle for stuff to record. Most of TV is crap except for Battlestar Galactica of course and Family Guy :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/"Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system. "
Uh... sure. Agreed.
"You have to sometimes sacrifice a quiet HTPC so the machine can cool itself efficiently. "
Hmm... so it supposed to be quiet, but not really.
"We choose the Intel Pentium D 840 "Extreme Edition" Processor!" :-)
Ok, quiet is RIGHT OUT now, and what a way to add to your heat problem
"While trying to push the Godzilla PVR to its limit we experienced an overheating and fan noise issue. "
LOL. Stopped reading right about there.
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I used to live in a house with 7 people, and we had a DVR that had 2 tuners. (so, you could record on one, and watch on the other)
Occasionally we would have conflicts with someone recording a movie during a regularly recorded TV show, and someone else was bored and wanted to surf channels - but even with 7 people, 3 or 4 tuners definitely would have done it. 11 is so overkill it's not even funny.
However...technology for technology's sake, I suppose.
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Yeah, they make a big point about wanting it to be cool enough to eliminate HTPC fan noise, then choose the latest Intel dual core CPU. Perhaps that part needs a little rethink?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I don't get this geeky thing where you'll spend godawful amounts of money on hardware (and create a huge electricity bill and cooling problem to boot) but take a hissy fit about paying for a DVD or a CD you want to enjoy. It reminds me of clients my law firm had who'd spend gobs of money for us to fight their personal tax assessments.
At $15 each, you could buy 285 DVDs. I can guarantee that when you pay for entertainment you're a lot more choosy about what you watch. It reminds me of software pirates who spend so much time and energy collecting software (or porn fanatics, too, I guess) but never actually enjoy what they've collected.
On Gentoo Myth was no sweat, just a normal install. The hardware I'm using is a USB DVB tuner I bought for 50 quid. 2.4.13 Kernel already had support built in so it was plug-and-play! Myth has actually been the easiest hardware upgrade (apart from new harddrives) I've ever had on Linux.
I did have some problems with the programme guide, but only because I was greedy and wanted two weeks in advance instead of just one.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yep, MythTV is a breeze. I did a full gentoo install and got mythtv setup and working in about a day and a half - and most of that time was spent setting up gentoo (first time gentoo/linux user, been using unix for a few years now thou)
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.
you hit the nail right on the head.
I have a two-tuner TiVo with my DirecTV. I record TONS of movies. Most of it I capture and write DVD. I very rarely have a conflict where I'm trying to record more than 2 things at once, and even when it has happened, I've always been able to find at least one alternate time among the three movies to reschedule one. 3 tuners, and I'd NEVER run into the problem. 11 tuners? Who the fuck needs 11 tuners? Sorry, but this article goes into my "Waste of time and money" bin.
How about something from AMD that is comparable in terms of prcessing power, while while generating far less heat?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Did I miss something about the Digital Cable issue?
In My area, TWC mirrors 95% of the analog channels on the digital tier.
So in order to get my Dig channels i would have have 11 Dig boxes?
Sure everytime you split the cable you lose 3.5 to 7db depending on which leg of the splitter you branch off, nothing a Cable Amplifier cant fix, digital channels are fine to about -15db to -20db, what im wondering is where the Cable Card support?
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
As soon as you buy a PC with enough CPU or Video horsepower, you have already spent more than double what an off the shelf unit would cost.
But what does that doubled cost get you? You get a machine that works the way you want, instead of one crippled for end users. If a component goes bad, you can replace it with off the shelf parts. You can manage your massive collection of tv shows with the standard unix tools. Plus, you can play arcade games while not watching tv. Also, do any commercial DVRs come with RAID5?
So there are several ways in which home built DVRs are superior to off the shelf DVRs. Whether they're worth the extra cost is up to you.
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Hmm, that starts to make me wonder when you move nearly everything but the pretty case into another room (because doing it the 'Godzilla' way obviously doesn't scale well).For not much more cash you could take all the contents of this PVR, put it in a case that will let it breathe, and stick it in the office/basement/etc for it to make as much noise as it wants. You run a fiber to carry the audio/video output from the server to the viewing room. Then you build a cheap, slim, sexy, dumb terminal of an HTPC that sends commands to the server over a network. All the storage and encoding power you want with none of the bulk or noise in the viewing room. :-)
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