Build Your Own PVR 469
An anonymous reader submits: "One geek's trials and tribulations of buying a ReplayTV, hating it, and deciding to build his own Linux PVR from nothing. The first try sinks into the swamp (hardware problems). The second try sinks into the swamp (more hardware problems). The third try... you get the idea. But success, finally, based on SageTV, a Windows PVR client. Makes you wonder if current Linux PVR apps are just too much of a pain to get working well?"
Well I can say this for one.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I commend this company for doing it in windows, but at the same time, I think what he's doing is stupid: selling software to run with windows seems to be going out of style.. especially since you can do it all and more with linux all for free.. it's just so much harder. We'll wait and see if this catches on....
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh, Tivo? (Score:3, Interesting)
The advantage that Tivo and Replay have over home-brew systems is that both systems are fixed hardware platforms and as such, drivers are a non-issue. Much like game consoles. Tivo's software was written and tested on Tivo equipment. They don't have to worry about getting different brands of sound cards to work, or different kernels or any of the multitudes of issues that home-brews have to worry about.
Coulda, Shoulda, Didn't... (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, I get the idea this person is not a veteran of the linux industry. He does a good job of navigating through what are essentially basic problems.
I don't think its worthy to mention he had his jumpers wrong... everyone makes a jumper mistake and it is fairly easy to diagnose.
His major fault.... He purchased a Win-TV 250. This card is pretty good actually with onboard hardware mpeg2 encoding. (I own a 250 as well as a vanilla hauppage win-tv) The drawback to the Win-TV 250 is it does not have tv out. He should have spent a couple extra bucks and got the 350.
The next big mistake was relying on some integrated tv out solution. It's been my experience that onboard has the tendency to be slightly different then their off board branded brotherin. Thus, I can easily see why he had some troubles.
He said it himself, he suffers from some impulse buying habbits. I think a little more research on compatability would have turned up better linux results. Personally, I went into the linux pvr project with absolutely no starting knowledge other then getting my hauppage card working a long long time ago. (out of the box support made it no chore). However, knowing nothing about the task prompted me to research, research and well... read more.
I wish he had tried a Knoppix MythTV Live CD as I would like to have seen the results. ie. used knoppix CD and it worked! (probably not with the odd video out)
Re:MythTV (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is worse than a dupe (Score:1, Interesting)
The article says the author is a "geek", and yet he's not comfortable with Linux/OSS, and compression ratios/MPEG quality settings were news to him.
Has the bar been lowered?
Re:MYTHTV does this allready! (Score:3, Interesting)
The only "issue" is that MPEG-4 really puts strain on my CPU, holding a Athlon 2600+ at ~60% while encoding.
I now do homework for the next day's courses instead of watching adult swim and the daily show at night. I also watched some football games with it, and having a frame-by-frame slow-mo is wonderful. What's even better is never watching commercials, cuts the time of shows way down. Even with a crappy four year old bt878-based capture card I get fine picture on my 19" monitor, which is better in color and brightness than my 19" TV.
I tried Freevo, which was horrid. I never got it to work correctly. But with a fresh installation of gentoo I had more trouble locating drivers for my TV card than getting mythtv set up and recording. The biggest major hurdle when installing was figuring out that my microphone was selected at the recording device, so I had to swap it to line in.
It wasn't point-and-click easy to set up, but it worked, and I suppose that's all that matters. Now that it is installed I havn't had one crash except when alsa was already in use and I tried to watch a recorded show (I really need a sound card with hardware mixer support).
Freevo (Score:1, Interesting)
I've found it to boast similar features, however it works great on lower hardware specs than MythTV.
It's using the ever-popular mplayer (pre-configured - so anyone lacking the intestinal fortitude to configure mplayer can get it going as a no-brainer!), with mencoder for capture.
Add to that the slideshow (for your digital camera images or pR0n collection), MAME support and so forth and it becomes a great option!
I setup one of those crappy "BookPC" machines with MythTV, however it struggled with high-res DivX;-) playback. Upgrading the CPU was not an option (i810 chipset), so I swapped to Freevo and it worked a treat.
Re:Linux problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
my own PVR (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardware setup: I use a haupage WinTV card for capture, a GeForceMX for playback (S-Video out to my TV), 2 sounds cards (so I can play and record at the same time), and tons of disk space
Software: mencoder run from cron, a script to update crontab, XMLtv for the listings, and a script behind a little webpage to search for shows and mark them to be recorded.
Piece o'cake
Re:MYTHTV does this allready! (Score:1, Interesting)
It as a great way to put old computers to use. Matter of fact, I have 2 servers each equiped with 2 Hauppauge PVR-250 cards chugging away happily right now.
The split nature of Myth, using a back end to record the programming, and a front end to display it, also makes it very easy to put a PVR on every TV in the house quite affordably.
There are many pluggins written already and more are being created all the time, MythTV, MythVideo, MythMusic, MythWeather, MythWeb, MythBrowser, etc.
In the 8 months I have been using it, the speed of development has been nothing short of amazing. Check it out, you will not be disappointed.
Dennis
Linux development tools are broken. (Score:0, Interesting)
The reality of the Linux situation is...there's one kernel. The interface has been solid and well defined for years. The only people allowed to hack the code are heavily reviewed, and ridiculed if they FU.
Now look at userland...if you have the stomach to do it. A multitude of half-finished, partially documented toolkits, and for each toolkit, a plethora of half-finished applications, all claiming to be "beta" or "production" quality, yet they crash at nearly every opportunity. That's not beta, it's pre-alpha.
Now you go to the user's help mailing list for application XYZ that doesn't work, and the first thing the developers want is full stack straces, rebuilding everything with debugging symbols, etc...sure, some user just spent 6 hours downloading binaries and libs to try the app, now he has to get all the source, much of which has drifted since the binaries released and will no longer build together, etc...yeah right!
Linux at the core is a wonder, everything else is sorely in need of some type of consensus on how to move forward. The people who disagree need to get off their high horse and do the right thing, meeting halfway as necessary. This stuff just sucks right now, and it needs leadership to suck less.
Finally, people need to stop duplicating projects. Finding ten broken projects on sourceforge is horrifying, when one considers that if this group of developers had worked together, the way the kernel people worked together, they would have a kick-ass, full featured app instead of a bunch of crippled, crashing, steaming turds.
There is only one rock solid, high quality, well documented user application development environment available for Linux. It's at netbeans.org
Re:Linux apps too hard to configure? (Score:2, Interesting)
Only Windows PVRs I've seen are "PVR in a box" that means TV card and software all in one pacage. You pay extra and most of that is for the hardware not the software.
The Linux PVR works from an off the shelf TV card not a specalised PVR card (of course if you find drivers for the PVR card your money ahead.. sort of.. having paid for the Windows software when you buy the card).
To get past the hardware limitations requires a brute force solution.... a faster box.
On that note... How hard would this be to do on MacOs X?
Re:SkyTV PVR (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope, not a recent development. My Tivo is one of the first series 2 models that came out. I've been using it with my comcast digital cable box for well over a year.
My first cable box didn't have the interface, but when it pooped out, I got my cable guy to look for a new box that did have serial. He found it, and I was happy to tip him that day. Works MUCH faster than a blaster.
Re:MYTHTV does this allready! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Don't use linux on a regular basis.
2. Have no coding skills to write your own PVR software.
3. Want to make hardware substitutions for the sake of thrift.
I don't mind seeing these PVR articles on slashdot every 2-3 months (actually, I look forward to them), but I wish more of them would give a better outline of the reviewer's qualifications. That way, if the article claims "PVRs are impossible - don't bother", you can judge for yourself if that title is warranted.
Re:I don't mean to be a fanboy... (Score:2, Interesting)
I will have to say that it was a lot easier to get as far as I did this time compared to last time. Last time I tried about three+ (probably longer)years to get a bttv-848? card going. I had to hunt down and compile tons of packages. This time a fellow setup an apt-get for the Fedora and this was as close as to a Windows type (in terms on non-technical need on the part of the user) install that I've seen. Very nice.
Popped the PVR-350 into the Windows XP box and it just worked. That plus the Hauppauge MediaMVP (baserd on Linux) player needing Windows means it stays there. It's this level of integration that Linux needs to conquer to reach for the desktop.
Anyhow I say if you just want it to work WITHOUT doing work look at Tivo/Replay/etc. BTW one of the good things going for them is a built-in infrared blaster to control your external tuner box. Figure that cost in for any homebrew solution.
Some cables company (mine does, 8.95 additional/a box) are coming out with a DVR rental situation that would be even easier.
To DIY or not to DIY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then in Dixons [dixons.co.uk], I found the Philips DVDR-70 DVD+RW recorder. At 279.99, I snapped it up. This machine needs the more expensive DVD+RW discs. It can also use DVD+Rs, but the functionality is a bit more limited with one-time media. There are only two SCARTs, and you'll need both of them for the TV and the satellite/cable decoder; but it does have audio/video/SV ins on the front {meant for a camcorder so designated CAM1} which you can use in an emergency, and audio/video/SV outs around the back. As you would expect on any DVD player, the TV SCART has RGB out; but unlike a VCR the auxiliary SCART has RGB in.
Chapter points are added automatically during recording, or you can add them by hand - and the ability to block certain chapters allows you to implement a form of ad-skipping, which is vital for most cable/satellite recordings. The picure is rock-solid even at six-hour compression. It will play MP3 audio CDs through your TV or hi-fi, but not multisession discs - you'll have to burn them in one go. This should mean those annoying copy-protected discs will play fine, though, and there's no mention of disabling the digital audio out during certain kinds of playback {but I haven't been able to test this}.
Downsides? No HDD so you can't record and play back at the same time, and the picture blanks out while the machine is busy. No RF modulator, so you have to use the A/V connections; but you'd be throwing away the advantages of DVD anyway. And I didn't build it myself.
Conclusion: Worth the price, and you'll soon get to live with the quirks. Expect newer models to answer them anyway.
****
Re:Linux apps too hard to configure? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a seasoned unix user
Am I the only one who thinks of the phrase 'the kernel's secret blend of herbs and spices' when they hear this phrase?
I guess so.
--Dan