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Vol. 5, No. 32
8-11-05
Over the next few weeks (which really means sporadically over the next few months) I’m going to document a project I’ve just started. You’ve all likely heard of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders, sometimes called PVRs for Personal) like TiVo and ReplayTV. With currently available hardware and software it’s not overly difficult to build your own and I hope to explain how to do it as I go.
This week we’ll cover the items you’ll need to get first, mainly because you can never tell when some wholly owned Congress Critter will ram some lame-brained legislation through to ban them.
The two most critical and most threatened items are the video capture device(s) and the PVR software.
The software is an easy choice: MythTV from www.mythtv.org. It’s open source, ergo free, and gives you all the same features as the standard DVR like pausing live TV, recording at pre-programmed times and giving you access to a comprehensive program schedule, albeit without a subscription fee. The software will even control set-top boxes like digital dish and cable decoders.
This program runs on Linux exclusively but don’t despair, it’s easier than you might think. The folks over at http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html have developed a Knoppix distro designed for nothing more than running MythTV. It’s a “live” distro so you can run it straight from the CD (which you’ll need to create with the freely downloadable ISO CD image) or you can install it to the hard drive like any other OS.
From what I’ve seen this installation is major-league simple. Our occasional download guru Troy Overton tells me he installed this on a PC in about 20 minutes. Regardless of your preference for running the software it goes straight to the MythTV interface so you can go right to work, no Linux knowledge needed.
The second critical piece is the video capture card or cards. MythTV allows for multiple cards to facilitate recording several channels at once, although personally I can’t see using more than one or two.
The best choices for the cards would be ones that have onboard MPEG-2 or –4 encoding, like the Hauppage PVR-350 or the Avermedia M179. Encoding the video signal on the card greatly reduces the load on the CPU, meaning you can use a lower end processor that, while slower, will definitely be cheaper than cutting edge P4 or Athlon 64 chips.
For my first effort I’m going to use an STB PCI TV/FM tuner card with a Phillips chipset. It was floating around at work and the boss gave it to me so I certainly can’t beat the price ;)
One thing to keep in mind in choosing a capture card is to avoid anything with an ATI chipset. I really like ATI video cards but their capture cards don’t have much in the way of Linux drivers.
As things proceed I’ll keep you posted on what I’m using for the other components but I’ll say right now to plan on a huge hard drive, as well as a CD-RW and DVD-RW drives. Video files tend to be quite large, hence the large hard drive, and having CD/DVD burners will allow for backup of favorite shows so I can clear up space for future use.
Now if I could only find my remote…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
The iTunes
Music Store has sold over 1 million songs since its debut
in Japan last
Thursday. That's a whole lotta yen for somebody:
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3526286
CNet
reporter writes piece on privacy and Google. As part of her
story, she
"googles" the name of Google's CEO and digs up some private
info. Info
is used in story. Google is angry because information
obtained from
Google searches is used in story about Google. Confused
yet?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/09/GOOGLE.TMP&type=business
Like
me, many of you carry an inexpensive flash drive with you at all
times.
If you've ever lost data because of a flaky one, then you'll
appreciate this
blogger's take on the care and feeding of our portable
pal:
http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/08/fix-format-usb-flash-drives.html
The
FCC has essentially deregulated DSL service, meaning that small
providers may
or may not be using your telcos lines a year from now:
http://news.com.com/FCC+schizo+on+DSL,+wiretapping/2010-1071_3-5821077.html
Copy
us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
Firefox Extension of the Week
Firefox does a
great job keeping track of the downloads that we make.
It has the very
handy Download Manager that logs everything that we
download and where we
saved it. This week’s extension, Download
Statusbar is one that
definitely makes a good thing better. As always,
here's where you can
get it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=26
Install it like usual, and then after you restart Firefox the Extension
Manager will list this extension. As soon as you start to download any
files they will pop up in a small bar at the bottom of the Firefox
window. This will keep your taskbar a little cleaner and lets you
manage the downloads without having to open the download
manager.
Happy downloading and browsing!
Daniel A. Williams
daniel@thepcgurus.com
Email Question of the Week
Q: Please furnish instructions for
re-formatting hard drive. I am running
Windows XP. My OS CD is an
upgrade version of XP. My original OS was
Windows
Millennium.
A: This website,
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp,
has
detailed instructions on reinstalling Windows XP Upgrade. One
note
though, if your computer does not boot directly to a CD, you may
have
to enter the BIOS and choose the CD as a boot device BEFORE the
hard
drive. Instructions on how to do so vary so you'll need to
either
follow your on screen instructions to get into the BIOS, or
have
someone knowledgeable do it for you. The most frequent way is to
hit
the Delete key at the beginning of the boot
process.
A.J.
Contact info and legal
stuff
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