Help me build a "tivo"
 

So I got a really good deal on a 160GB hard drive today and I've been thinking about creating a media center out of a computer to act like a "tivo".

I have a Maxtor 160GB Hard drive and a house with "Cat5e" wiring.

What should I get in way of a tv tuner card? I've heard that Beyond tv 3 is good, anything other than that I should look at?

What I need the most input on though is building the actual computer. I'd like to use the new hard drive in a seperate unit than this comp. What do I need to build an apropriate system for this task?

I've never done any computer building or anything so I'm a complete newbie at a lot of this. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Hmm well as a "newbie" at computer assembly and stuff...can't say that building a tivo is exactly the best project to pick first. However, if you're ready to dive in head first, pick up a Hauppauge capture/tuner card and check out www.mythtv.org. The "manual" installation is probably going to be a bit much, but there are some pre-built distros that you might try (see the web links page).

If you would rather go the Windows route, you can always just get an ATi All-in-wonder video card and install the PVR software that comes with it. From my experience the ATi PVR stuff is kinda lame though. MythTV looks freaking AWESOME and I'm planning on setting up a MythTV box as soon as I can collect all the parts.

MythTV is great. I have mine set up with the Hauppauge PVR-350, and it works pretty damn good. The PVR-350 is great, because it is a hardware MPEG2 encoder and decoder, so it really takes a lot of load off of the CPU. The only thing I regret is that when I built it, I was going for size, so I used a Mini-ITX motherboard, which is kinda slow, so changing channels is a little laggy for me. But I am eventually going to build another one with a decent motherboard and processor.

If you don't have much Linux knowledge, then you should probably go the Windows route. I have heard that SageTV is pretty good. (They also have a Linux option now)

There is a good windows PVR software called Media Portal. Unfortunitly, I don't have the hardware to actually get it up and running with timeshifting and everything, but the configuration and normal usage was easy to use with just the arrow and enter keys.

Thanks for the tips guys. My brother in law's got a lot of experience and can help me out a bit.

Probably be a little while in the making since I've got a few other projects on the go but I'll get it done here soon.

Does anyone have experience with these things and HDTV? I'm trying to find a card that will work as a PVR for both over-the-air HDTV broadcasts and analog cable, preferably with the included software but I might not mind paying for other software if it's under $50. I don't care about QAM or anything having to do with digital cable/satellite tuning at all. I also would like it to work with Windows and Linux if that's at all possible with HDTV. The cards that I'm looking at are the HDTV Wonder, MyHD MDP-120, and FusionHDTV3 Gold-T. What's the most likely to work well with these conditions out of the three? Is there another option I've missed?

I'm also aware of the Hauppauge WinTV-HD, but I've heard bad things about its drivers and/or software, and the pcHDTV HD-3000, but I'm not aware of it working with any Windows PVR software. It's also hard to tell whether issues like these have been resolved since searching gives you a lot of old results, so if one of these is known to work let me know.

There is PCHDTV , but I believe that there is only Linux drivers for it. I thought Hauppauge used to have one that at least had Windows drivers, but I can't seem to find it on their site. If I find anything else, I will be sure to post it.

Ive been very impressed with the MythTV application. We use it for everything--Tivo, music, pictures, weather... Very impressive. It will definitely help if you have linux experience or know someone that does, but there are some good tutorials out there for it.

Im not really sure about the HDTV thing. I seem to recall there not being very many HDTV tuner cards that played nice with linux, but I could be wrong.