Home Theater PC people

[bowlcut]

Anyone else here use a pc as their DVR?

Ive currently have an old p4 2.4ghz 1gig ram, and 500gig of hd space. Installed with Knoppmyth version of MythTV.... LOVE IT.

Only bad thing, gota reinstall. The free service zap2it.com is going away for their listings. And my install is now over a year old...so would be harder to retrofit the new service into place than it would be to reinstall.

Anyone else as big of a geek as me? Anyone interested in setting one of these up? Ive got great ideas and plans....i can help....i just dont have the cash flow to build my ideas...and i like building more than anything else. I guess thats why I pit crew more than race.

Like building large file servers....if i only had a big budget :D

[thetimanator]

I've been wondering how hard it would be to set up a PC as a DVR.

For some reason your making it sound a lot more complicated than I thought it would have been.

[Disney Lincoln]

I am VERY interested in setting one of these up!!! I have an old PC with two HD's (like twin 80's I think) And I could add a 350 or so if needed.

I'd LOVE to get some help in setting this up. My PC is a custom build but a couple years old. Asus MOBO, AMD Athlon, 1GB RAM, not much for a video or sounds card right now but I'd do whatever it takes to have it kicking ass. I also have a 57" HDTV that' i'd be playing through.

Where to start???

[bowlcut]

Its actually very easy depending on your goals. Over the air HD, easy. Regular cable, easy. Digital cable, gets complicated.

My setup is just one tuner so I can only record one channel or watch one channel. It comes down to how much you want to spend and what you want to run.

As for difficulty, I had mine running in basically a night. I am a linux person so I went with a free open source solution. If you have a windows vista license, or windows xp media center you can go with windows. I just didnt want to pay 100-300 dollars just to play around. And I believe in open source. Using MythTV is awesome but there are quirks for sure. Windows is a tad more polished and possibly more user friendly.

As for setup, the rule of thumb is 1ghz of processor per "stream" of content. So if you want to watch one show and record another in the background, 2ghz is needed. But now days thats a little different but for older machines the rule applies. Then you can reduce cpu load by buying the right tv tuner card. a good one will cost you 75-350 dollars and will have a hardware encoder on it. It offloads the heavy lifting off the cpu onto itself and means you can do more with what you have.

To play into your hdtv, id get a nice video card. A Nvidia with a dvi connector is the minimum Id use. Thats all a matter of budget but you will need something to drive all those pixels. Then Id assume you'd want to record HD over the air, the free stuff. Thats another 100 bucks per card, so if you want to watch one channel of HD and record another 2 cards is needed. Id then pick up a Hauppauge pvr-500, it has two analog tuners so you can record 2 regular cable channels or watch one record one....picture in picture as well. Sound card, any sound blaster card will do fine, get like a live or cheap audagy. Go pick up some speakers of some sort, I recomend logitech stuff. Get one with a remote so you can fine tune the volume as well.

Hard drive space is always the hold up. HD will take up like 5-10 gigs an hour. My recordings of regular cable are like 1gig an hour. I have 500 gigs in this box currently, so around 300-400 hours of recording is doable. Remember you can also use this as network storage if you wanted. If mythtv is used you can setup samba and do shared drives, i also have my myth box doing some of my downloading. you can off load stuff like torrents to another machine than your desktop.

doing digital cable is ... interesting. you have to get an IR blaster to change the channels and such. Like a tivo you have to sit this little thing in front of the cable box. i couldnt get it working 100% right in linux last time i tried with my old cable box. its a matter of getting the right signaling, like you hit 0 on the remote it has to send hex code in terms of flashes to the box. Its "doable" but takes some work. I hear its easier on windows but i dont use windows.

The final option is waiting for cable card. there are a couple cable card tuners on the market. You get what looks like a pcmcia card from the cable company and insert it into the card. then you can use it just like a box. you can also get a cable card for many tv's now. its nice, and its going to be the law they have to offer them. its something ive never used, it wont be coming to linux anytime soon either :( so i dont think ill be able to use it till i switch.


If you want to really do it, its going to take probably 500ish dollars over top what you have to get a nice setup. but i love my myth box. i am considering going to windows media center for cable card functionality. Its by no means as slick as a tivo, but you can have tons more storage over a stock tivo, and can usually do more with it. like burn all this stuff to disk. or use the computer as a network storage device as well...

[Disney Lincoln]

I have Win Media already. I guess I can install it on this box and license it and such.

I have a stereo system already. I think I could play through that as well.

I don't really even want to record any over the air HD stuff. I rarely watch HD channels as it is. I'd love to be able to use my Digi cable box or a regular cable line-in to record. I'd love for it to work similar to TiVo, but can see how that might be a problem.

NO problem on the 500GB HD. I can swing that. I looked at vid cards last night too. :)

[PhoenixINX]

Currently working on getting a buds setup online, complete with Vista Ultimate MCE and dual ATI Digital Cable Card Tuners.

BIG PITA so far, as I'm getting a feeling that Comcast isn't blasting a strong enough signal to the house.

Who knows though... we'll keep experimenting. Maybe once we get his working, I'll actually buy one. :lol:

[Twistedoffpurp]

Cable cards are very, very hit or miss. If you have a cable guy come install one they usually bring a stack with them, and they'll try them till they get one that works. Then you'll be lucky if you get all the channels. You guy's now have me thinking being that I'm in the biz I may have to start researching a computer setup to do this reliably for low cost and media center edition will be a hot ticket until vista can hold its own. Gonna begin pondering ideas. Hope I can contribute to this one.