I have been running a HTPC for about two years now. I use mine primarily as a storage box and to playback movies and saved TV shows. I have found that getting TIVO-like functionality is really hard to do. The reason is DRM.
I am a DirecTV guy and for us it is almost impossible to build your own PVR. This is because AFAIK you can't find a tuner card for your PC that will decode DirecTV signals. On the cable side, supposedly you can get a CableCard to work with your PC to decrypt cable signals like from Cox or Time Warner but it is a very mixed bag and has lots of issues. You can usually get the standard definition to work but the HD and newer signals are usually pretty hard. The only easy part is getting OTA (Over the Air) signals to work. In my area, CBS, FOX, NBC, and ABC all broadcast in HD and I can get a tuner card for my PC to grab that and do TIVO stuff. Really I don't find the TIVO-like behavior to be of much use. I have mine setup to Torrent all my favorite TV shows automatically and then my wife and I watch them whenever it is convenient for me. It is in the legal grey area (only BTing HBO and pay-per-view stuff is definitely illegal). On the hardware side, I use a 1.8 Tbird with 1GB of ram on an old GeForce2 board. Works well for DVD playback and xvids and stuff. HD playback is an issue. For 720p or better I really recommend getting at least a Core2Duo class CPU and definitely a video card that does on-board MPEG-2 decoding. Supposedly there are some upcoming cards that will do onboard MPEG-4 decoding which will help with the HD-DVD and Bluray stuff but I haven't seen any. Also, tons and tons of disk space. I use a 6-250GB RAID 5 array and am running out of room, mainly because I want the convenience of having all my content on the disk available at any time. I would really suggest at least 2 TB of storage if you are serious and don't want to mess with swapping discs and the like. -- Brian Find my public PGP key at http://pgp.mit.edu/ On 6/21/07, James Maki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Winterlight > This assumes you aren't contemplating a "Media Center and strictly > want to record TV... and we are not talking HD. > > The most important thing here is the CPU, and a Intel P4 or above is > the only one for this job. For encoding the faster the better. AMD > just doesn't do as well with this. For basic recording and editing > out commercials 2GB of RAM, and a quick 72K drive works great. I would tend to disagree with this statement. I have been running a PVR/DVR on a AMD XP 2500+ (FSB oc'd from 167 to 200 to give XP3200+ performance) with 1 gig RAM for about 3 years, 24/7. In fact, I started with only 500 MB RAM. The caveats are that I am using Hauppauge encoders which have built in mpeg encoding leaving the computer's cpu relatively untouched. I have two USB2 PVRs and a dual channel PVR500 connected to the same computer and can record 4 shows while watching a recorded show without problem. This is for a regular analog cable signal, not HD. I use SageTV (version 5) software to run the PVR. It provides a free online "tv guide" and TIVO like functionality. I am using an inexpensive ATI Radeon 9200 with s-video out to run a television for the monitor. I connect to the PVR system using [EMAIL PROTECTED] for maintenance, etc. Otherwise, a mouse and remote is all I need to control SageTV. A great application for an older system rather than state of the art, IMO. For editing (commercials, etc.), I use an AMD64 3700+ with 1 gig RAM, again it gets the job done without breaking the bank. For Xvid trans-coding, I use an XP3200+ with 500 MB RAM, using AutoGK. Jim Maki [EMAIL PROTECTED]
