[plug] PVR advice

[Craig Ringer]

> Anyone on the list know much about building PVRs? I know TV in Perth hardly 
> justifies the ownership of such a device, but I reckon there's an interesting 
> project in there.
> 
> I was thinking about hardware options, and, since the thing is going to sit in 
> my lounge, *quiet* hardware options in particular. Fanless cases, CPUs, 
> graphics cards, etc. Anyone put such a thing together?

There's another issue you may not be aware of. There is no way to get 
suitably formatted TV listing data, say as XMLTV - you currently have to 
battle websites with rather painful interfaces to get the information. A 
perl-based screen-scraper could do the job, but that's another world of 
fun :-( .

As such, I'm not sure there's all that much point. I use my PC to 
schedule recording of the occasional show or movie I actually want to 
see - mencoder + cron does well. That's about it, really. I haven't 
looked at MythTV/Freevo because (a) I don't care that much, it's TV and 
(b) lack of program data.

As for the hardware, though - things like the shuttle mini-PCs are 
common choices. If you want to be realtime encoding _and_ recording, 
you'll need a lot of CPU power. Perhaps digital TV will help there, 
since I seem to remember somebody saying it's MPEG2 and you can just 
dump it to disk straight from the card.

Craig Ringer


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