Building A Low-Budget TiVo Substitute? 743
thepuma writes "Since I'm cheap, and don't want to pay monthly fees to Tivo, I am researching building my own low-budget Personal Video Recorder and player. Free software options include Freevo and MythTV. Hardware options are the main cost factor. How would you go about building the perfect low-budget PVR?" We've looked at similar questions before, but the guts of such a system (both hardware and software) have been improving -- MythTV, for instance, now supports Hauppauge's PVR-350 card. How would you build a system like this now?
Sage TV (Score:-1, Informative)
- Record two standard def stations, and a high def station at the same time while watching a fourth video of any type. (Obviously, this requires having two tuners and an HDTV tuner.)
- Record standard TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-1, or just about any other format. This makes it easier to make VCDs, DVDs, or just play the program back on a standard PC.
- Playback using Dscalar to deinterlace the video.
- Play DVDs
- Play DivX
- Record shows as favorites (just like season passes) or let SageTV record things based on my past viewing habits (much like tivo's suggestions only I don't have to bother with thumbs up and down buttons)
- Do all of the above with an integrated schedule, which is free. No need to pay a monthly fee.
- Play and manage my MP3 library (I think you can do ogg, ape, etc. with some tweaks to the config)
- Stream video and audio to another PC over my LAN.
I'm sure I'm missing much more. This thing does way more than any tivo, even a hacked tivo, and it's constantly being expanded. It surpasses TiVo and ReplyTV in every way. I've even found it to be more flexible than MythTV and Showstopper (though they do have a few benefits in some areas.)
I have a Myth box (Score:5, Informative)
This Month's Linux Journal... (Score:4, Informative)
Go to this site :-) (Score:3, Informative)
TV Cards [tv-cards.com]
Pretty helpful site for beginners.
It will be tough (Score:2, Informative)
The one pitfall for homebrew PVRs... (Score:2, Informative)
DirecTivo (Score:5, Informative)
If you are a new sub. you can get the DirecTivo for about $50, and with a DirecTivo you only pay $4.99/month for the Tivo service (and that is for the account not the number of boxes). For me in my area DirecTV is MUCH cheaper than cable. Also the quality of a DirecTivo is far superior than any other option available for non-HDTV PVRs. It records the direct MPEG stream no encoded done on the box. Also the DirecTivo can record 2 shows at a time!
Course if you want to do it yourself you can and it would be fun, however it would most likely not be as stable, quality not as good. And you probably wont save much money if you already have cable or directv.
Xbox makes a GREAT frontend. (Score:5, Informative)
When I am recording off my old win-tv capture card and I am in gnome running mozilla, etc. I can tell a big difference in video quality as when I am not doing anything on the computer. So if you have a slow computer, you want to use X/mozilla/etc, or just want better video quallity get a hardware video capture card (happauge pvr 250/350). A pII 400mhz would do very very well with a pvr 250/350.
My main frontend is a Xbox with gentoo installed. If you have a Xbox and you are as disappointed as I was with the games the xbox is your best bet for a front end for a TV. It "fits" beside the tv, I mean who wants a tower computer beside the tv anyways? Also some guy made a xbox-linux/mythtv [blkbk.com] distro. I haven't tried it but it looks really neat.
My other front end is a laptop with 802.11g card in it. I must say mythtv does QUITE well wireless.
Look at your cable company (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The one pitfall for homebrew PVRs... (Score:5, Informative)
When MythTV wants to change channel on the cable box, it calls a user-definable external script. I use LIRC [lirc.org] to emit the IR control codes to switch channels on my General Instruments cable box.
not necessarily cost effective (Score:4, Informative)
And the bottom line is, you don't have to pay tivo a monthly anything. Just buy the tivo and don't subscribe to the listings. Or you can buy the lifetime and not deal with monthly payments. Or buy a used tivo(with lifetime service) on ebay and get a deal. Lots of folks are trading up to series2 this way.
I have to admit that the series2 with home media is awesome. Get a $30 usb nic, and you can stream images/audio from the network. There's a sweet *nix program called byrequest (http://sourceforge.net/projects/byrequest/) that lets you serve files without windows, and they claim is will serve video also...
So why don't you go put that in your pipe and... nevermind.
Re:The one pitfall for homebrew PVRs... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The one pitfall for homebrew PVRs... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The one pitfall for homebrew PVRs... (Score:2, Informative)
I just did this (Score:5, Informative)
- CPU: Athlon XP 2400
- MB: Some random Gigabyte motherboard, about $60
- Case: I splurged here and got an HTPC-looking Cooler Master ATC-610
- Video: GeForce2 MX 440
- Capture: Hauppage WinTV PVR 250
- 120MB IDE HD
- 802.11 wireless card
- DVD-ROM/CDRW drive
In total, I spent around $700. This is clearly not cheap compared to a TiVo, but I can do a lot of things that a typical TiVo can't and I don't have any service fees to pay. If I really wanted to save money, here's what I would have done:Frevo is shakey (Score:2, Informative)
I would suggest doing a LOT of research so you have the right hardware and know what to expect if you do go this route.
TiVo is cheaper -- initially (Score:2, Informative)
The Tivo works. It's easy and simple.
Worth the cashola. For a DIY'er... go for the HTPC solution but you will end up paying more upfront. You figure what a $100 on the video card... or maybe more and say $350-$400 at a minimum for a PC...... so 500 bucks
The TiVo is cheaper... unless you keep it for over 6.5 years
(DirecTV has been running $99 special for series 2 Tivo's for a bit...... and you can always find really good deals on Ebay from legit independents)
For ease of use, the Tivo wins hands down... (Score:2, Informative)
The Tivo's real genius is that it is so blasted easy that trying to copy all of what it does is hard. It's the research that has gone into it that makes it what it is. I also have a Replay 5040 for backup, but if my Tivo died, I'd go out to CCity/BBuy and get one immediately. I've given the Tivo the mom test, and it passed with flying colors. My mother who hates technology and my obsession with gadgets would also replace her tivo should it expires.
I havn't ever had a computer with so few glitches, it's been running along since 8/01 and hasn't been shut off unless the power went out in all that time... and it still works great.
A few caveats, IMHO I've got the best type of Tivo the DVR for DirecTV which is intigrated with my sat service, and has the two tuners for duel recording, and I have upgraded the HDD in my Tivo so I have 80 hrs of storage.
As far as the computer solutions, I think I'd recommend SageTV, but that carries with it the fee involved as well. Whatever way you go, it'll be worth it. I was in a hotel a few nights ago, and was going crazy without that ability to pause, rewind, and skip commercials.
Peace!
Jim
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:5, Informative)
May I direct your attention to this [membled.com].
This is currently what MythTV uses [mythtv.org].
Regards
elFarto
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:4, Informative)
Why I love my MythTV (Score:5, Informative)
BUT!
There is no subscription fee - TV listings are downloaded via XMLTV.
I can store CDs and DVDs on the HD.
I can run multiple front-ends, enabling me to watch TV/recordings on another machine on the network.
I can update recording settings through a very friendly HTTP interface.
I can extract and re-encode recorded shows.
In addition, people have written lots of groovy addons, including:
A MAME frontend
A CallerID module (when the phone rings, callerid information is displayed onscreen!)
A weather report module
The possibilities are endless.
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:4, Informative)
Old Series 1 TiVos can be used without subscription, as a sort of digital VCR.
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Jim
Splurge on the hardware! (Score:3, Informative)
The $45 ATI TV-Wonder you can get at best buy isn't going to cut it. This thing is ok for watching TV, but it's not even great at that. You definately want a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG2 encoding, preferably at 12MB/s. I'd recommend a Hauppauge [hauppauge.com] product. You may even want to look into HDTV tuner cards, although I have no experience with them.
In the end the quality of your hardware is going to matter most, because regardless of the software you use to accomplish your goal, the end result will only be as good as the hardware that was used to capture the image.
I had a TiVo, but sold it after I built my own PVR. TiVo is great, and did some things my PVR doesn't (like suggested viewing), but all in all there's nothing better than your own home rolled PVR
Re:It will be tough (Score:4, Informative)
Not true (about the processor) - The Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-250 do all the processing onboard.
Here's a good resource: HTPCNews.com [htpcnews.com]
MythTV (Score:3, Informative)
I cannot recommend MythTV any more highly. It really is the way to go, especially for those who love to hack around with Linux.
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:2, Informative)
Compare these costs: (Score:4, Informative)
Hauppauge's PVR-350 tv tuner card: $200
Tivo after rebate: $200
It's hard to justify the cost of building your own when a tivo is so cheap. I'd like to build my own, but I can't do it as cheaply as just buying tivo hardware. (Yes, I have a Tivo).
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:5, Informative)
The important thing for me is that the WAF is high (wife acceptance factor). We're almost never home so to be able to watch whatever we want whenever is a real plus. And she really loves the image gallery feature.
IMHO MythTV rules.
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:5, Informative)
Coolermaster component case atc-620 -$88.00
Motherboard with processor and integrated items-99.00
128 meg of ram $28.00
120 Gig hard drive - $99.00
OEM-boxed PVR-250 capture/tuner card $80.00
IR reciever + remote that is lirc compatable $40.00
$434.00 + tax
all from my local computer shoppe. It would have been cheaper if I went looking on ebay for the parts.
Re:I'd just buy one (Score:3, Informative)
My setup (Score:4, Informative)
On the downside, there was far too much fiddling I had to do to get things right. If I were to do it all again, I probably would just by a TiVO and get the home media option.
Bottom line: Whatever you do, get a PVR250/350 for your capture card. Software capture cards simply don't hold a candle. Everyone who starts with a WinTV Go or other software card ends up upgrading to a PVR250 (yours truly included). Do yourself a favor and go straight for the PVR250.
Linux HTPC How-to (Score:3, Informative)
Linux HTPC How-to [sllug.org]
--brian
Re:how much? (Score:5, Informative)
I've researched this a little bit before. IIRC, it works out to about $6 or $7 a month. There are a tremendous number of variables so it is difficult to predict a particular situation. for instance, many of the "old" PCs that people toss in the corner as headless file servers don't support idling. Rather than go into a low power state, the CPU runs at full power in a noop loop. Sometimes older machines don't spin down the disk properly either. Newer machines should go to a low power state much more readily, but will require much more power while they are running.
The grandparent post was correct that running an old pentium as a firewall rather than buying a LinkSys box for $50 is a foolish economy. Of course, if one requires capabilities that the simple box doesn't provide - that is a different story.
I'm a fan of the VIA mini-itx systems for "always on" applications. With judicious use of eBay, one should be able to assemble a decent low power system for less than $300. I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance. Think of them as about a 500 MHz Pentium equiv. Great little machines for a home file and print server, and they are practically silent aside from being good for the electric bill. If you run a mini-itx as your server/web-browser/email box and only use that Dual Athlon machine when you are actually gaming, you should see a noticable drop in your electric bill.
Re:Sage TV (Score:3, Informative)
The worst mistake I ever made.
DVD-Recorder... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A cheapskate and you want to use a PC? (Score:4, Informative)
You're better off spending that $100 on a larger hard disk (bout 100GB for $100), and hacking it in.
You negelect to tell people one thing: Standard warranty on any Tivo/DirecTivo is 90 DAYS. Tivo lifetime subscription is linked to the box. Day 91, if your box burns up, you're out the whole bill. The only way you can transfer your subscription is if the box dies and is REPLACED BY THE MANUFACTURER UNDER WARRANTY. Many, many people have been burned by this.
I am a Tivo (series 1) owner. I'm going to build a MythTV box because I can't bring myself to blow another $500 on a single use box that I can't even web browse or play DVD's on. If the experiment fails, I have a PC for my daughter. If it works, I still have a PC for my daughter that also happens to record TV.
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:5, Informative)
Re:who says you have to buy new? (Score:4, Informative)
Um, yes, actually.
PVR-250 is hopelessly inadequate for modern PVR. It's got an analogue tuner, FFS!!! At least get a DVB card.
Re:A cheapskate and you want to use a PC? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, for the Directv/Tivo unit, you can't. There is no lifetime service option with Directv/Tivo, only the Tivo standalone units. You have to pay $5/month to Directv, who presumably shares some of that with Tivo. Plus, if you sign up for the full DTV package (HBO,Starz,etc) the $5 fee is waived.
Re:A cheapskate and you want to use a PC? (Score:3, Informative)
Cool question... (Score:5, Informative)
The reasoning for the different items are as follows:
A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews [tomshardware.com] by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.
Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.
WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi [sourceforge.net] drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.
Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.
Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.
MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.
Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.
Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one [quietpc.com]) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.
Now all I have to do is wait...
TiVo Guides -- Was Canada Re:I'd just buy one (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.tivocanada.com/
Re:how much? (Score:4, Informative)
This is exactly the reason people should take an interest in mini-itx motherboards for home servers. A 60W power supply could feed one of the fanless 600MHz mini-itx boards at load. I don't have the means to measure, but I suspect at idle it runs around 15W (assuming the hard drive gets spun down during idle, which is not good for the lifetime of the drive, but good for power savings).
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:2, Informative)
Everything works great. The wife love's it. No way Tivo can compete.
The 2400+ can encode two channels simultaneously at 640x480 mpeg4, playback a channel on it's front end and serve video to the other two frontends at about 90% CPU usage.
I found it relatively easy to set up. It helps if you sorta understand how a database works (i.e. mysql).
Re:Budget (Score:3, Informative)
Hmmm, first of all, an out of the box firewall is not $200, but more like $50. You can even find cheaper.
Let's compute the cost of a PC running 24x7 for you. Your number is here for a 300watt PC. At idle time, it will draw approx half of that: That's $1.20 bi-monthly, or
So there you go: 5 month to reach the price of an out of the box unit, whose power consumption is so lower than 150watt that it is negligible here.
Of course, that was under the assumption that your PC can get idle. If you're talking about your old P166, there is most likely no HDD idle timeout and no CPU idle time. So you can bet on a $15/month electric bill increase.
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pioneerburner.com/ [pioneerburner.com]
http://devsdeals.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.
Is your video editing and gaming that you can do on pretty much any PC woth the extra $1800? Didn't think so...
I've got to go with MythTV (Score:3, Informative)
- Record two standard (...) Check... in fact, the recording devices can be on different machines.
- Record standard TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-1, (...) OK, Myth's codecs are wrapped up in hybrid nupplevideo and require a touch of effort to convert.
- Playback using Dscalar to deinterlace the video. Check, optional deinterlacing built it.
- Play DVDs Check
- Play DivX Check
- Record shows as favorites (...) or based on my past viewing habits You can set up season-pass like sitations using the number of recording options and its priority system. I've already stated my opinion of guesswork recording
- Do all of the above with an integrated schedule, which is free. Check
- Play and manage my MP3 library Check
- Stream video and audio to another PC over my LAN. Check... as well as my X-Box
In addition, you get MythWeather which supplies weather reports to your screen, MythGallery for photos, MythGame which integrates with a number of emulators including MAME and NES emulators, MythWeb to set up recording over the internet. And you can theme it, it's free and runs on a free OS, the developers are fairly responsive and development is constantly moving forward. Go ahead and list your favorite features of SageTV and wait for them to be integrated into MythTV.
All that said, Sage does look like the most complete package for Windows (I used ShowShifter back in the day).
Knoppmyth, yet again... (Score:5, Informative)
You can burn the iso, assemble your pvr/media machine, boot of the iso, provide a few usernames and passwords and Knoppmyth will partition and install everything you need to get MythTV running on your system including mysql, xmltv, mythtv. As a bonus you get the magic of apt-get to install almost anything else you might want. The fontend program is very nicely done and it supports remote controls and external channel changers too.
-dameron
Re:A cheapskate and you want to use a PC? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I just did this (Score:3, Informative)
I have a 120GB drive on my ReplayTV, and most of my recording is at 1GB/hour. With MythTV, you can do offline transcoding to mpeg4, so you can store a lot more on there.
Of course, if you're using an ATSC source, you'll need a lot more storage (ATSC is the HDTV broadcast standard). I think that's upto 8 or 9GB/hour.
I'm going to start with a 200GB drive for my MythTV system (I'm going to order the parts within a week).
Buy a ReplayTV 5040, save time/money/headache (Score:3, Informative)
I chose replay over Tivo because it was much ($100 or so + $5 a month) cheaper for the ReplayTV with ehternet and sharing and picture viewing and all that, plus it has auto-commericial-skip (beware: the 55xx series does not). I wish it had the thumbs up/down thing, but nothing is perfect.
Now, if mp3 and video game emulation are must-haves, then build the MythTV box. Tivo also supports mp3, but you have to spend $100 + $5 a month or something for their permission to listen to your music.
Re:how much? (Score:3, Informative)
My laptops use ~45 watts with the screen on, without the screen it is about 35 watts (one is a PII366, the other a PIII-1GHz, both have 12" screens)
My P4 systems all use about 150 watts (no monitor) in idle (not powerdown, drives spinning) state. The worst I could manage running benchmarks was around 200W. Monitors vary a lot. Mine run about 3w in sleep, about 20W active.
1kwHr/day = ~42 Watts always-on.
electricity here is about $0.07 kW/hr which means I pay $1 per month for each 20W always-on in my apt.
My laptops cost me about $2 each. My computers $7 each.
My SMC firewall uses 7W, and it costs much less to operate than the old Cyrix 166 that used to fill that task (besids which, it doesn't use much more electricity than the wireless router I had before, and also replaces that)
So I'm all for specialized products to fill my needs. Of course, I have a dedicated MythTV PVR box I built myself (which is one of those $7/month electricity expenditures), but I wanted the ability to do multiple simultaneous recordings, have a web-interface , and have multiple front-ends (all of which were not availiable on Tivo until recently, and which have premium costs attached). But it wasn't a cost decision. I just like to tinker.
Very Happy with MythTV (Score:4, Informative)
Has anyone else used one of these clearly beta units? Ack!
That lasted about 3 weeks. So I sat down and looked at our needs and our options:
- Two tuners (the only nice feature of the SA8000)
- Intelligent recording options (record once/series/all)
- Sufficient storage (enough to fit the entire Tour De France: 20 stages x 3hrs. That was our unit of measurement. YMMV)
- Ability to record network channels (NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox)
- HighDef is a nice-to-have
Options:
- DirectTV with DirectTivo (No Rochester locals then) (~$550 for Series2 unit with big HD)
- DishNetwork with the Dish921 (High Def! Have to lie to get Plattsburgh locals) ($1000+)
- DishNetwork with the Dish721 (Have to lie to get Plattsburgh locals) ($500)
- Time Warner with SA8000 (Ack!) ($5 + $9 rental/mo)
- DIY box (???)
Wife gave the project a green light, and I bought the parts to build it. Motherboard with integrated LAN and VGA, $100; AthlonXP 1800+, $50; PVR250 Tuner cards, $130 x2; Wireless mouse & keyboard, $40. I already had a case and 120Gb drive.
It took a bit of work and a weekend to get it running the first time (Myth 0.11). Thanks so much to Jarod's guide [goldfish.org]. I tweaked it and broke some stuff about 3 weeks later, and rebuilt it. Only took 8 hrs that time.
Tweaked stuff again and broke it again. I should realize that it's a TV device, not a playtoy. This time I rebuilt it in 3 hrs. (That included restoring a backup of the programs saved on the HD.) ATRPMS with apt-get (thanks Axel) makes it a breeze.
It's been fine for the last month. It sits quietly mounted between floor joists in the basement crawlspace storage, where it is keep quite cool. As a bonus over Tivo, it has a picture gallery viewer of all the PCs in our house, it runs MAME and ZSnes, plays MP3s and shows the weather.
Thanks Issac and all the developers who put so much hardwork into a great project. Your efforts are very appreciated.
By the way: The best part about this being an open source, Linux based project? When there's a problem with the app and I'm not at home, I can ssh to it and fix it remotely. No more trying to explain things over the phone!
Snapstream (Score:4, Informative)
My HTPC is an Athlon 2800, 1GB of RAM, an all-in-wonder 9600 Pro and a 3ware Escalade 7506-12 with 12 200GB Maxtor drives (two RAID10s of 600GB each) and 2 160GB Samsungs. It's in a 4U rackmount case with a 550 Watt PC Power and Cooling PSU. I use an Asus A7N8X Deluxe for a motherboard, with its support for Dolby Digital 5.1 on digital outputs. The PC is connected to an Integra DTR-8.2 receiver (that's its name, not how many speakers it supports) which itself can be controlled with its own radio frequency remote, and whose video switching and AV zone support I make full use of.
The whole thing is sitting in 19" rack in a closet, so I don't have to listen to it be all noisy.
It runs 2000 Server, mostly because, at the start of its life, I was working with 2000's soft-RAID features, and "Pro" versions of Windows don't do redundant RAID.
I use Snapstream PVS for TV-watching and recording, primarily because it integrates nicely with my ATI RF remote, and because it supports tuning my DirectTV receiver via a serial connection.
The PROBLEM with Snapstream is that it's not the paragon of stability that it should be. Every few days it flies off the deep end and takes my poor HTPC with it. I have a 35-hour DirectTivo for a back up and second video source, just in case.
I also have three 400-disc DVD carousels of varying ages that I use to house my collection of movies. The DVPCX985V is the newest of those, and the one I appreciate the most, since it support SACDs. The 3 jukeboxes are connected to each other and operate as a single logical unit.
Regular daily viewing is done on a 32" 16x9 Princeton display. It can handle HDTV signals but I haven't coughed up the cash for DirectTV HDTV reception or a video capture solution that works with HDTV. I also have an ancient, 800lumen, 800x600 Sony projector that I plan to replace when its bulb dies, probably with an NEC HT1000 (3000:1 contrast ratio).
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Guide Information (Score:2, Informative)
I've been updating nightly from Zap2it's website via XMLTV nightly and they haven't blocked me yet. Personally I wouldn't mind if they offered a pay service for $5/month for guide information. I'd buy it for my MythTV box just to get the information in a format that doesn't require me to hack around updating XMLTV every month or so when zap2it changes their website around. This gets to be a pain in the ass.
Surely you're joking (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:4, Informative)
I want to do it because there are no TIVO like boxes available for sale in Canada (except one that is built into a satellite reciever).
If us Canucks want a PVR, we either have to go cross-border-shopping for something that doesn't require a subscription (which is not available for sale to us) or hack together something.
Which option do you suppose yer typical Canadian Slashdotter will go with?
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I spoke hastily (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Two stations at once? (Score:3, Informative)
However, if you do have to have a box...I think you can rig up one of those 'IR Blaster' setups..that point the ir lights at your box...and the computer changes the box's channels that way.
I have a MythTV box (Score:5, Informative)
You *SHOULD* build a MythTV box IF:
- You are an experienced Linux user, have some extra hardware lying around (or money is no object), and are looking for a fun and interesting project to mess around with.
- You are an inexperienced Linux user, have some extra hardware lying around (or money is no object), and are looking for a fun and interesting project to learn Linux with.
- You are not one of the above, but absolutely must have the single best Multimedia Convergence box you can possibly have at all costs.
You should *NOT* build a MythTV box IF:
- You are an inexperienced Linux, user and have no money and no hardware lying around.
- You have no interest in learning Linux.
- You are an experienced Linux user, have no money and no extra hardware lying around.
- You want something that works now, not something that is sorta great now, but will be absolutely great later.
This exactly what I've been telling my friends when they get jealous of my MythTV box. I suspect in about a year or so, building a MythTV box will be a LOT simpler. Until then, follow my guideline above.
Bryan
Re:Knoppmyth, yet again... (Score:2, Informative)
See http://mysettopbox.tv/ for the home site for KnoppMyth
Re:who says you have to buy new? (Score:2, Informative)
>Um, yes, actually.
This is misleading. By "..press 'record' on the TiVo from work..." I presume the poster means scheduling recordings over the internet. This cannot be done with a stock TiVo, at least with the Series2 I have. One must purchase the pricey ($99) "Home Media Option" to be able to do this. With MythTV [mythtv.org] and SnapStream [snapstream.com] it comes for free.
Re:I've got to go with MythTV (Score:5, Informative)
I really don't understand what's creepy or annoying about that feature, the box is going to be powered on anyhow, there's absolutely no reason not to use that feature.
And, if for some reason you don't like it, as the previous poster said, you can EASILY disable it. You go into the Settings menu, and just tell it not to record Suggestions.
Re:Sage TV (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously man, you reposted my message word for word, including punctuation, without even crediting me!
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
Rogers just came out with a PVR. It replaces the digital cable box. Price is a bit steep though. $600 for the PVR compared with $200 for the normal digital cable box. Or you can rent it for $25/month. The regular box is $10/month.
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:5, Informative)
If you are building a box from the ground-up, it's best to copy what someone else has already built, or do some serious research into your hardware first. (The Asus Pundit system seems to be popular, and pretty inexpensive. Not to mention it's not much bigger than a VCR.)
My biggest concern with mythtv is the use of XMLTV for the guide data. You just know that someday soon, the websites that are being scraped are simply going to start blocking XMLTV (at least one website has started doing it already), and then you are left with a really expensive VCR and no guide data.
That said, once up and running, myth is quite nice. Sure, it could use a few tweaks here and there, but I'm sure those will be worked out eventually. If you don't want to keep updating the software, get a TiVO
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
The catch is that you can't really use it with satellite (it grabs the guide data off the cable or over-the-air broadcast), and you only get 3 days of guide data at a time. But there is no subscription, and it works just fine all over Canada.
Don't want to pay the $700+ FutureShop is asking? Amazon.com has them for under $250 US.
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:2, Informative)
$100 --- Hauppauge pvr-250
$90 --- 160 Gig HD
$10 --- 10' keyboard cord for across the room viewing
I watch from the monitor, which isn't much smaller than my TV.
I found the software setup lengthy, and slightly difficult, but I think of this as hobby time. It is probably easier to build a stand-alone system from scratch than to add MythTV to an existing machine that you wish to preserve.
My biggest complaints are with the TV listing procedure. XMLTV or the site it grabs from changes formats, and MythTV croaks.
My machine's kt133 chipset causes hardware problems. Granted, this isn't really the fault of Myth/Hauppauge but it's the only time the problem manifests itself. When the bus gets overloaded, Myth gives an error and stops recording. Nothing is more frustrating than watching the first 12 minutes of the Daily Show, then discovering you don't have the rest. Fortunately, this happens infrequently, and I gather that the pvr-250/MythTV setup plays nicer with other motherboards.
I don't run myth on the machine all the time, and it takes a little time to start up. If I just want to watch some tube, I often just flip on the regular old TV, commercials and all. Seems like it kind of defeats the whole purpose.
On the other hand, it is really great to be able to watch shows whenever I want. (I would never be able to get my act together enough to actually set the vcr.)
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:5, Informative)
Having finally got it up and running however I am continually amazed at its performance and functionality. MythTVs interface is clean (and plugable which is fortunate) and architecturally very sound. My 1.6 GHz Athlon XP easily handles recording and watching television. The commercial skip warrants the cost by itself. Furthermore, after getting LIRC working, it is completely controlled via a universal remote. After some work, Xine worked flawlessly as a DVD player. That in addition to the music interface (with excellent full screen visualization) and a game emulator module and it blows away commercial products. What I've found particularly cool is the optional web interface allow remote scheduling for recordings.
In response to the buggyness, despite initial difficulties, a 20 day up time thus far is pretty good to me (considering it was only restarted as part of testing).
Re:Don't do it for cost (Score:3, Informative)
Also, you really need 256MB for MythTV, but that's only a few $ more. And it seems I'd rather spend that $80 on a beefier processor than the TV card, since with a 2+GHz you definitely shouldn't have performance problems and the extra power comes in handy with other things as well.
Re:I have a Myth box (Score:2, Informative)
I had a TiVo (Series 1 w/30GB) Until I got DishNetwork. At that point, I got the DishPVR 501 and sold my TiVo to my sister.
Big mistake. The DishPVR doesn't have Season Passes. It doesn't automatically adjust recording times if a show is delayed 30 mins. It's a much klunkier interface than TiVo.
I consider the DishPVR a (small) step up from a VCR. The Program Guide integration is the only thing it has going for it.
As soon as my DishNetwork contract is up I'm dropping it and going with DirecTV with a DirecTiVo.