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."

Comments

Mine is bigger

[killercoder]

My Setup:

2.6 Terrabytes of Disk Space (2x Raid 5 array's in 2x chassis').
6 Tuners - 2 SDTV, 2 HDTV, 2 Digital Cable (QAM256)

MythTV is very powerful, supports alot of tuners, and ALOT of folks out there have small-to-large setup's. 2005 was the year of the PVR - this article is simply a mine is bigger statement that can't be backed up.

Re:Mindless overkill...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to be a pain here, but it really seems like this guy has alot more money than sense. There are several strange design decisions that have been made, and it seems to show someone who really isn't knowledgable.

• Using a massive chip - For what, exactly? As long as you have a reasonable video card, the need for a fat cpu for videos is very minimal. I suppose its possible that HDTV may require faster speeds, but i doubt this. AFAIK, win32 currently doesn't really take advantage of dual core.
• Using RAID 0. - Is he trying to get a drive burnt out?
• Using NTFS - This is where it gets strange. I think that if you were fucking around with 1TB of data, you would want to choose your OS primarily by filesystem. Hell, I would. NTFS is one of the least stable, worst performing filesystems around. I would probably want to use XFS (it has this tendency to stack writes to the RAM before making them, reducing drive wear - I forget the name) and noflushd, so as to keep hd wear to a minimium (considering that there are gonna be long periods where no writes are done). Eventually, you could feasibily switch to ZFS to keep space use high.

Convert to MPEG-4 in Non-realtime

[billstewart]

The video cards are already converting to MPEG-2 - if you want to squash that to MPEG-4, you don't _have_ to do it in realtime, you just have to have some spare disk space for scratch. You'll almost never be recording 11 shows at once except to be silly - if you can keep up with 2-3 simultaneous recordings, that's almost always enough for realtime, and if you've got too many, you can convert the rest later - or watch them unconverted, if you're in a hurry.