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

One of the coolest PVRs ever built?

[Caspian]

With all that hardware, I'd guess that it is, in fact, one of the hottest PVRs ever built! ;)

Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built?

[AKAImBatman]

I'd guess that it is, in fact, one of the hottest PVRs ever built!

Not to mention over 1TB of recorded shows, and STILL nothing to watch!

Mindless overkill...

[FalconZero]

four Seagate 250GB SATA drives for storing our BTV recordings and two Seagate 160GB SATA drives for the OS and other applications.

320GB for OS and Applications?!?!? - I know Windows is a bit bloated but why the hell would you want 320GB for Apps? Thats 68DVD's worth of application! And I only know of a handfull of apps that are DVD sized. And before anyone says "maybe they've got lots of (big) games" this thing is specifically (and clearly obvious from the hardware) a PVR.

Re:Mindless overkill...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the 4 250gb's are striped, which is how they got 1 TB out of the whole array with 4 drives and not 12:

We configured the four 250GB drives as RAID 0 (striping) and formatted them with NTFS and 64k blocks to increase the disk size and performance.

Seems silly - if one drive goes, the whole array dies - and on a beast like this, heat is likely to SERIOUSLY degrade the life of those drives...

Re:Mindless overkill...

[kalpol]

>ability to make grated cheese Fondue, you mean to say.

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.

Over kill

[Belseth]

an 11-tuner PVR machine with HDTV support using off-the-shelf components.

Is there 11 channels of porn?

Re:Over kill

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Is there 11 channels of porn?

Haven't you ever seen Spinal Tap? 11 is just better than 10

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.

It's a giant ad!

[rsborg]

Ok, absurdity of 11 tuners aside, I noticed some serious warning signs that this project really didn't seem all that well thought out, and instead seems like a huge AD for beyondTV, Intel, and pretty much all the "high end" components you need for your media center type beast.

"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.

Slashdotted

[c0d3h4x0r]

Too bad they didn't build the Godzilla of Servers to go with it.

waste $ on h/w won't pay for content

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC

[lildogie]

"Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system."

With _noise_ a close second?

Re:The Software

[thebosz]

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.

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.