Build Your Own PVR, Then Trash It

[Krell]

First, the good news. Plummeting storage costs and the availability of special hardware have finally made it cheap and easy to shrug off the shackles of TiVo and build your own personal video recorder out of an old PC.

The bad news is digital-rights management technologies will probably make your homebrew PVR obsolete faster than you can say "Super Bowl Sunday."

It was a Super Bowl sale that inspired this reporter to undertake assembly of his own home media center, which proved both delightfully easy and cheap, ringing in at less than $200 -- about the same as 18 months of subscription dues to TiVo.

I started with a program called GBPVR (http://www.gbpvr.com/), a free (but not open-source) solution developed by a New Zealander named Graeme Blackley. It's configurable and has an active developer community building plug-ins and skins.

GBPVR plays nicely with a unique $100 extender device called the MediaMVP (http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet.htm) that sits in the living room and bridges your computer to your TV and stereo. It's about the size of a CD wallet, and is powered by PowerPC chip and a trimmed down version of Linux.

The MediaMVP comes with a very basic interface, but GBPVR tricks it into running different software through an ethernet cable. You can then use MediaMVP's included remote control device to navigate the interface.

My two other purchases were a TV-tuner card (in my case a Hauppauge Win-TV 150 PCI card on sale for $50, though many others (http://ruel.net/pc/tv.tuner.links.htm) will also work) and a 200-GB hard drive found for another $50.

The initial set up was simple. The hardest parts involved stringing CAT5 cable out one apartment window and into another, and figuring out how to install the hardware.

Now my 6-year-old Pentium III box whirs away in the office, while my living room TV tells me the weather forecast, plays back internet radio streams, pauses live television, shuffles through thousands of mp3s -- complete with displays of the album art -- and records hours upon hours of The Simpsons, and it never uses more than 5 percent of my CPU's power.


Complete Story (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70328-0.html?tw=rss.index)






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[mfgbypooter]

Thanks Krell. Now I know what to do with the old computer I have wasting away in a closet.

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[nukehella]

"You could always unplug your cable box and record free HDTV off the public airwaves, but perhaps not for long. The industry is trying to get Congress to make it illegal to build TV tuners that record broadcast HDTV without including DRM on the recording."

I can see it now.------"Granny,your toaster has a 75ohm resistor in it.That can be used in a circuit that could bypass DRM.You're going down Bitch!"

[shawners]

I see every tv show on the internet, even pay per view. Its just as effective to download it then to build it, and burn on cd-rw in DIVX form.. and rewrite. If you love it, you can encode a bunch on to 1dvd.

[Nogoodpunk42]

this is silly with all this DRM talk like everything that's ever come before someone will figure out a way to build it and someone else will figure out a way to take it apart
by the time they make HDTV require broadcast flags then they'll have ways to get around it. I say don't worry about it; remember they used to say, "if man was supposed to fly god would have given him wings" we have wings they're just called delta, american airlines, etc. someone will always figure out a way

[shawners]

They make a system built on rules and add-ons.. Then they make laws to cripple hardware or products that could disable any protection method possible.. Kind of like xbox doing by going after people who sell modded xboxes.. They cant sue or take out people who sell mod chips since that doesnt have a bios that disables game protections.. They release the software code that does it, and you install yourself.. But the xbox 360 is designed to detect, upgrade, and be harder to get through.