Building the Godzilla of PVRs

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Building the Godzilla of PVRs

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 19, 2006 @09:39AM 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."

8 of 318 comments (clear)

One of the coolest PVRs ever built? by Caspian · 2006-01-19 09:41 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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1. Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built? by AKAImBatman · 2006-01-19 10:34 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  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!
  
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Mindless overkill... by FalconZero · 2006-01-19 09:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:Mindless overkill... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-19 10:03 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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...
2. Re:Mindless overkill... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-19 11:16 · Score: 5, Interesting
  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.
Re:Over kill by Average_Joe_Sixpack · 2006-01-19 09:46 · Score: 5, Funny

Is there 11 channels of porn?

Haven't you ever seen Spinal Tap? 11 is just better than 10
Slashdotted by c0d3h4x0r · 2006-01-19 09:52 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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Re:The Software by thebosz · 2006-01-19 10:13 · 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.

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