Homebrew PVR
 

I am wanting to build a homebrew PRV for our entertainment system. Has anyone here put one together? Can you recommend parts? I'd like to stay in the $300-400 range.

BTW, I have DirecTV and will be connecting through a dialup connection (damn coutry living).

My recommendation would be to find the software you want to run on the machine, and then look at what they recommend to use with it.

MythTV
Sage TV
GB PVR

The three I listed are among some of the better ones I've seen/heard about. There are many more out there. MythTV is a very popular one. Read the specs to see what kind of decoder to get and what not.

Yeah, I'll definatley be going with MythTV, or more specifically the KnoppMyth project. I am really just looking for some first hand experiences from my peers here. Any good or bad experinces I should look out for.

But thanks for the reply.

I've setup a MythTV system using Gentoo Linux, and it went very well. I just used old hardware that i knew worked well in Linux (AMD Duron 700 + MSI board). The best thing I can recommend would be to get a capture card that is well supported. Trust me, it'll make setting things up all the easier. Hauppage's WinTV PVR-250 is the card I used, and it's probably one of the best supported. The WinTV PVR-150 by the same company is essentially the same card, but uses a different chipset. It's decently supported currently, but getting better by the day. These are both hardware capture cards, which are a must if you want to go with a lower-end system. The encoding is handled by them so the processor doesn't get overworked. That's a good thing because it can then concentrate on more important proceedures Myth has, such as commercial flagging (yay!) and transcoding, to make your files smaller.

I attempted to use KnoppMyth myself when I first started out, just to get a system up and going quickly. It didn't end up working so well for me. I'm a control freak too, so I chose Gentoo because it was easy to pick the parts of myth I wanted and leave out those I didn't. Plus, I'm already running it on my desktop machine, so I'm familiar with it.

Good luck with the setup, and if you don't mind, keep us posted on the results. I'm always eager to hear other's experiences with MythTV.

i use meedio and am quite pleased with it. it does the pvr job on top of providing a full frontend for all other multimedia functions.

the tv part of the software suite just entered its full version, but it allows for users to develop "modules" for the program and enjoys a lot of community support.

it isn't for a quick once-install with all the features working out-of-the-box like MCE, but if you're a tinkerer and have a good knowledge of multimedia hardware/software you'll find it's one of the more flexible solutions out there right now.

I don't reccomend any of the cheap MSI TV tuners :-/ The software is worse than the cheap hardware. Then again, you'll be using linux... what a good idea!

Check out this site. It has comprehensive reviews of software, capture cards, even cases that will blend your PC into your entertainment center!

Wow, did that sound like a marketing pitch or what? Seriously though, I read the site a few nights ago on a whim, and it's very informative.