My PVR
My wife doesn’t quite understand it. She thinks it’s just kind of a waste of time right now, but I think she’ll come around quickly once I have it in place and tweaked out to my/our liking.
Here’s what my PVR (Personal Video Recorder) consists of:
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Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 TV Tuner Card - PCI I paid $68.95 after shipping on Ebay
- This is pretty much the default PVR tuner card. No, it’s not HD, so I know I’ll have to replace it later, but I was trying to do this all on the cheap.
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Maxtor 160 GB Hard drive I paid $ 44.95 after shipping on Ebay
- With 160 GB and the program I’ll be using, I’ll be able to store up to approx. 80 hours of video. Seems a ridiculous amount of video, but… who knows, maybe we’ll use it all.
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3ft HI-RESOLUTION S-VIDEO+AUDIO to 3 RCA ADAPTER CABLE
I paid $22.67 after shipping on NextWarehouse.com- Because our TV doesn’t have S-Video in, I had to do a little “finagling” to get stuff to work. This cable has S-Video and “headphone jack” (that’s what I call it) on one end and composite (Red Yellow White) on the other end… which I CAN get in to our TV.
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GB-PVR
FREE- This is a windows based PVR program. Very extensible and very well supported. From what I’ve seen so far on their website, and from running through the menu (currently I can only go through the TV Guide and see how to record shows) I am VERY impressed.
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Yapi2XML
FREE- This is how I get my TV-Guide into GB-PVR. It’s pretty easy to set up and it updates whenever you decide to schedule it to (ie. Every night at 2am)
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Gateway PC Pentium 4 2.0Ghz 640 MB of RAM running Windows XP Pro SP2. FREE
- This was an old computer that was no longer being used (it was in the graveyard), and after asking my boss, he said I could have it.
I should be receiving the video card today in the mail, and I’m waiting for the hard drive to be shipped (dang ebay resellers…). I imagine by next week I should have all the pieces I need and be able to get this puppy up and running. Yesterday I spent about 3 hours reading through the GB-PVR wiki (EXCELLENT wiki btw) and seeing all the great plug-ins and skins that you can put on this. If GB doesn’t pan out like I hope it will, I also have my eye on MediaPortal which is another free PVR software that runs on windows.
I know MYTH TV is very popular as well, but honestly… I absolutely DETEST linux. It makes me throw up a little in my mouth just thinking about it. I have some awesome friends who tear it up in linux, but… I ain’t that guy.
I’m so excited about getting this thing up and going… I’m practically giddy!
Total Cost $136.57
October 18th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Very cool Kyle! About five years ago I put together my own PVR as well. Old PC, 40GB OS drive I think, 200GB Seagate for the video (it was easy to fill up!), and I used SageTV, pretty much the only Windows PVR software worth its salt at the time (with MythTV on Linux being the main competitor). It’s $80 for the software, but it was very good at the time and I imagine it’s gotten better since. I had three of the PVR-150s and one PVR-250 (input and output), or maybe it was just two PVR-150s and the 250…anyway, I could record three channels at once, or record two and watch one live! And I had a remote control and a remote license to watch shows over the network on another computer (with another remote control). It worked great for about six months I think, and then the OS drive died. I didn’t have a backup, and I’d spent hours and hours customizing, tweaking, skinning, commercial skipping etc. and I never got it back off the ground.
So there the PC sits in my closet. Needs a new OS drive I think. Second drive still has a ton of old shows in MPEG-2 format sitting with no index or interface. All the video cards are still happily sitting in it. Might be worth dragging out when I have the time. That’s my plan anyway. You see how well that worked over the last 4-5 years! But it was a fun project and was awesome while it worked! I hope yours works as well!