While talking to him, he mentioned that his friend had built a PVR. A PVR, for those too lazy to follow the previous hyperlink, is a Personal Video Recorder. It's a device that can record video much like a VCR. The difference is that PVRs record to a hard disc. This allows for cool features like the pausing of television. A perfect example of a commercially available PVR is TiVo. (Wikipedia loves this paragraph)
Now the problem with TiVo (corporate link) and other commercially available PVRs is the monthly charge and the near inevitability that they'll be swallowed by competition and my equipment will become obsolete. Even if they're not swallowed anytime quickly, who would want to pay for those monthly subscription fees? I, and apparently many others before me, would not.
Rod's buddy had installed a openly available PVR called MythTV. I read some pages and saw some screenshots and was instantly impressed. I always wanted a TiVo, but I couldn't stomach the monthly costs. I definitely felt the gut urge to undertake the adventure of building a similar system.
Adventure? Indeed. See, I've done some research this evening and I can go a few routes...
- No adventure & empty wallet: Go with TiVo
- No adventure & less empty wallet: Go back to my regular television and rot my brain slowly
- Some adventure & empty wallet: Buy a commercially available "do it yourself" PVR software bundle.
- Tons of adventure & less empty wallet: Get a copy of an openly available "do it yourself" PVR software bundle that is much harder to install/configure because it isn't being funded by commercial purchases (we'll argue the freeware debate another day)
I'll be updating (ir)regularly with the latest details of do-it-yourself-PVR-building. Perhaps I'll be paving the way for one of you to follow later on. And for those of you (thank you Tom) who enjoy my tirades about dumb topics and pointless, longwinded stories have no fear. I'll still be writing in those valuable nuggets of daily time-wasting (your welcome Rod).
3 comments:
KnoppMyth - http://hust.la/KnoppMyth/
This, among others can be a helpful starting point, since most of the work is already done for you (required binaries, dependencies, etc)
Thanks for the link. I have a lot of reading to do. There seems to be many options for PVR. Tom doesn't want me to wuss out and go Microsoft when this is "clearly a linux" task. KnoppMyth could be a nice and easy solution for someone who's never operated his own *nix box.
I've found that Linux is a whole different challenge from the PVR. I use Mandrake 9.0 and I've found it acceptable at displaying my TV card but useless at recording on it.
I've had a WinTV card for 5 years now. Since I got my large hard drive, I've been able to capture hours of video depending on the size and compression.
I still don't use time-shifting software, which is what turns a computer from a recorder to a PVR. I suppose its possible to get a good PVR program for Linux, but I'm not sure about the ultimate functionality.
I've tried to go to a Linus OS. The main sticking point besides the fact that settings seem to disappear is video editing. Linux doesn't have a good video editor that works like a VirtualDub. Then again, it's open source. I bet someone could recompile it for a Linux distro.
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