Step aside TiVo, here comes Freevo

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Step aside TiVo, here comes Freevo

Reuters catches up with the homebrew PVR revolution with today's article "Step aside TiVo, here comes Freevo." It's a new overview of the home PC-based options, including Freevo, MythTV, Snapstream's BeyondTV, and Microsoft's Media Center. It also mentions the the Build Your Own PVR website.

Personally, although I've heard good things about MythTV and Freevo, unless you're fairly familiar with building your own PCs from scratch and running command-line tools, Snapstream's BeyondTV is the easiest way to dip your toe into the homebrew PVR pool. Microsoft's version is a non-option, as it can only be legally obtained when buying a new home theater PC, which typically runs $1200-1600.

by Matt Haughey June 8, 2004 in News

Comments

That's a good point,
although I'd like to mention that I had a near braindead easy time installing SageTV paired witha hauppauge PVR350.

I was very surprised. It's as close as I've seen to near tivo functionality without having to be an uber geek to install it.

*shrug*

BTW the byopvr site is dogging it a little bit again... please be patient. I didn't expect a pvrblog dotting to be so severe =)

rampy

Posted by: rampy at Jun 8, 2004 5:41:51 PM

It would be nice to see someone like El Gato (or anyone) pull together something that closely approximates the Tivo experience using MythTV/Freevo/other and some cheap hardware. Any takers? Should be doable for $200-400, no?

Posted by: pb at Jun 8, 2004 9:53:33 PM

And think of the possibilities of bumping up ratings from 1-3 to 1-10, syndicating your wishlists, play lists, voting lists, and just better general access to your television watching information.

Posted by: B.K. DeLong at Jun 9, 2004 4:59:23 AM

$200-$400 would be pretty hard. I spent $200 on my mythtv frontend alone, xbox w/ mod, xebian and xbox-mythtv. You really need a good capture card, I tried the tv wonder ve but my pic just looked like crap. With that in mind you would have to spend $125 on a pvr250/350 to get a nice pic. $125 for a decent size HD (actually saw a seagate 160 for 125 somewhere) bla bla I could go on but you get the point. Spend the money you'll be happy you did. For those of you not using the xbox as a front end I highly recomend it.
Lisman

Posted by: listman at Jun 9, 2004 9:58:59 PM

You can get decent images out of a ATI wonder ve. I don't know how easy it is to do it using MythTV, but if you use something like TVTime with it's advanced filtering stuff it's fairly easy.

Although on TV's you have to set it up so that you use half the aviable framerate, otherwise you end up with bad sync and it makes the picture herky jerky like your CPU is bogging down.

What makes the Mpeg2 cards wonderfull for this sort of thing is that they are hardware encoders. With a Bttv-based card like the ATI Wonder Ve, in order to get mpeg2 or motion jpeg you have to do that completely in software, so your using your CPU to do the encoding.

I have both a Wonder VE (if you want a cheap card, get something else, there are better ones. Or at least the next model up. Don't confuse this with the All-in-Wonder cards. Those use completely different setups and don't work well under linux if at all.) and a WinPVR-250.

(also I am talking about older model. I don't know if ATI has revamped their line since I bought it. Mine is Bttv based.)

At max resolution you get like 640x480 or something less then that. To encode that into mpeg2 at decent quality you end up using 40-80% of the CPU even with fairly fast setup. With a mpeg2 hardware encoding card you can just go "cat /dev/video0 > tvshow.mpeg2" and that uses around 8-10% of the CPU, AND you get better quality. That will result in a file that's readable in mplayer, although it's non-indexed so that stuff like Xine will have trouble with it.

So that way you can get some very nice mpeg2 cards and load up your computer with them. Add some fast harddisks and your set.

With some good linux knowledge you can get things going on your box that Tivo owners dream of. MythTV is just the tip of the iceberg.

For instance it can double as a Icecast server. You can use VideoLanServer to stream out DVD's, media files, your mpeg2 card outputs (and experimentally the Bttv based cards). You can save disk space by using mencoder to do double-pass mpeg4 re-encoding on your saved shows and get (possibly) better results then you can get anywere else.

Rip and save DVD's. Retransmite them over your LAN to your laptop. (I watch TV on my Laptop plenty of times.)

Save songs from MTV, hell even get a FM radio card. Ham radio?! Set up a miniture TV station? Whatever you want.

If your a big media buff and your a Linux geek like me, the only thing that holds you back is your imagination and skill. Oh ya $, too.

IF you just want a PVR, then TiVO is your best bet. It's cheap, full proof, and easy to use.

Plus you can use it to get digital Cable, since they work with some cable companies and directtv to get the propriatory mpeg2 signals and channeling for digital cable and stuff like that. Otherwise you have to do a hack were you have the digital cable box with a IR transmitter on your computer and have that change channels.

Of course if your in Europe you enjoy the DVB standards and digital media cards are cheap and plentifial. To bad US cable companies like to screw their customers over. Hopefully the HDTV standards will help solve our company's limited moral state.

Posted by: Anonymouse at Jul 21, 2004 6:56:24 AM

I just seen your write-up. I reciently bought a tashiba 120 Hard drive DVR / with DVD recorder. Type 2. I am not impressed with TIBO from the 80's. It s/w is smart, But out dated. Can you give me pointers on a newer DVD access to my 685 system. The Tivo system has not yet support it. And if they did, It would take me more S/W to get it on board. I expect to have broadBand next week. I would like to have a XP frendly system that communicates with UNIX. JR

Posted by: James Renton at Jan 27, 2005 2:33:12 PM

Simple solution buy 2 tv tuner cards multi Format if ure gonna move countries install them in ure pc get a decent vid card 128MB Mediocre performance enuff ram a hard drive or DVD Burner and ure set u can watch and record diff channels use pc and record 2 channels and pre program ure pc (SOFTWARE NEEDED) to record late nite porn

Posted by: bingy at Apr 17, 2005 2:33:00 PM

Step aside TiVo, here comes Freevo

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