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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."
With all that hardware, I'd guess that it is, in fact, one of the hottest PVRs ever built! ;)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
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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.
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I don't get it.
Is there 11 channels of porn?
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/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.
While this is mostly a solution in search of a problem, it would be kind of cool to have in a dorm room environment. You could install it, and then have some sort of signup process through which users reserve specific chunks of time, for their various shows. While it's doubtful that one person would ever want to watch 11 programs that were on simultaneously, 11 different people might.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
"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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make popcorn! And then, get a soda machine or beer keg, catheter for, well, you know and...voila! The ULTIMATE home enterainment system.
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I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Too bad they didn't build the Godzilla of Servers to go with it.
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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/
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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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.
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.
"Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system."
With _noise_ a close second?
In that pic they are trying to use the static electricities to loosen up the electrons. With the electrons loosened they can tranfer the datas faster. They said when the electrons are too tight only 10 of the tuners can be used at a time.
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.
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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.
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?
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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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THIS is the Mothra of Toaster Ovens. aaaaaand, THIS is the King Ghidorah of filing cabinets. /me bows.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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. :-)
This sig rocks the casbah.