During a lunchtime chat, a coworker mentioned that he’d managed to get his own homebuilt PVR set up, and it got me wondering…
I’ve been thinking about getting a PVR for a while now, since I don’t have a set schedule for watching TV and most stuff I might want to catch is on at weird hours, or on channels I barely remember having, or I simply forget when it’s on, so it would be nice to have them recorded automatically. The commercial models are a bit lacking though, either lacking localized support, requiring subscriptions, meant for certain specific connection types (digital, satellite), or just not as feature-filled or flexible as I’d like. And, of course, why do things the easy way when you can do them the hard way instead…
So, just what would I need to make my own PVR? My coworker has his set up as a standalone, dedicated system, so let’s see, if you put together a good smaller case, lower-end motherboard and CPU, just enough memory, a decently large hard drive, a cheapo video card with TV-out (not like you need massive 3D acceleration), a TV tuner card, and a DVD-ROM drive, you’re looking at about, oh, $850…
Ow. Well fortunately I’ve already got a whole server sitting here dedicated to running background tasks 24/7, so that takes care of most of the above. It’s a slower system, but the above model of TV-tuner card does the MPEG compression in hardware, so the CPU requirements are supposed to be fairly low. So, I spent a good chunk of the weekend setting up MythTV to see just how far I could get it working and see if it was actually a viable solution.
Installing MythTV itself was pretty painless; the worst part was just trying to get all of the prerequisite Perl modules for the ‘xmltv’ library, which turned out not to be necessary anyway. Sigh. Still, before long I could run the MythTV backend and frontend, browse TV listings, etc. It’s actually extremely easy-to-use and professional-looking for an open-source project.
Next, I needed a TV-out video connection. Fortunately I had an old GeForce2 card sitting around, so I popped it into the server and spent an hour or so trying to get it configured properly. Nothing was really wrong; I was just unfamiliar with multi-headed X configuration. After finally discovering the Magic Words, I had a second desktop showing up on the TV screen. A problem quickly arose, though. After a few minutes, the TV picture would suddenly switch from colour to black-and-white, and I’d have to turn the TV off and back on again before it would revert back to colour. It’s not the TV or S-video cable, since they’re fine with the DVD player on the same input, so it must be something flaky with the video card itself. I guess I’ll just have to replace it anyway.
And I still didn’t have sound going through the TV itself. I could have split the output from the sound card, but then I’d have to make sure I turn off the computer speakers before playing things through the TV. To be truly seamless I’d need a second sound card dedicated to providing output solely for the PVR. That’s actually not too difficult, as I’d been meaning to upgrade the sound card in the server to an SBLive for hardware mixing anyway, and could just leave the old SB16 in for the PVR.
But I still didn’t have any TV input, either. I do already have a TV-tuner device, an old ATI TV Wonder USB, but it only has Windows drivers. Fortunately, the local Future Shops sell that same Hauppauge TV tuner listed above, and it works really well with MythTV from what others have reported, so I put on my jacket, caught the train down to near a local Future Shop, marched right up to the computer parts counter, and…turned around and went right back home.
What the hell am I doing? I barely have time in my life to do the things I *want* to do, let alone the things I *should* be doing but keep putting off, and now I’m wasting time and money pursuing things like this just in case I *might* do them? Sure, it’s fun to just geek out and set things up for their own sake, but I sometimes wonder if in doing so I wind up spreading myself too thinly, accomplishing a wide breadth of things but none of them in very much depth…
You’ll have to help me out, here. What’s a PVR? :-)
Personal Video Recorder, like the TiVo and such, that record TV programs automatically to an internal hard drive. You can set them up to, say, ‘record all new episodes of Law & Order’ and it’ll automatically search the TV listings, grab episodes you don’t already have, ignore repeats, etc.
Not that I mean to play devil’s advocate, but…
If you’re even a tiny bit like me in believing that 99.9% of modern televison programming is absolute drek, and always miss the one or two shows you actually want to watch, then perhaps this specific project is more than just a challenge in itself. It may not qualify as something you “might” need, but instead as something actually useful beyond just the challenge.
Of course, investment (the financial kind; time is something every individual determines alone) is entirely another story… But that’s for you and your secretive bank balance to determine. :-)
It’s not so much the money as it is the time. Every hour I spend watching more TV because of this is one less hour I have to spend on catching up on reading. Or advancing my programming skills. Or tidying up. Or catching up on all the games still unplayed. Or developing another hobby. Or even, shock and horror, socializing.
Of course, the same is true of Everquest too… :-P
Yeah, I can understand that. It seems as if your work days are getting longer as well, and that certainly isn’t helping…
Mind you, the concept of having a TiVO/PVR/whatever-else-it’s-called-now would help. You can store all the shit you wanna watch until you *do* have time to watch it…
Then again, if your schedule is even more overflowing than I think, you’ll need to sink a few Gs into the multi-exabyte RAID you’ll need on that thing for all the shows you’ll store up… ;-)
How did that get through, Cam?
(There was a whole ton of comment spam, for those coming in late.)
Although I had WordPress set to hold any comments with links in them for moderation, it looks like it doesn’t count unanchored URLs, which WordPress’s output engine then automatically converts into links when displaying comments…
Those guys had actually been spamming the site for a few days now, but all of the previous dozens of attempts had been fully anchored and caught, until they found the loophole.