Building a home-made PVR

m_stan

I'm good with computers, don't want to fork out for Sky+, so looking for advice from those who've done it on building a DIY PVR.

I currently have a decent ATX based PC with 1gig RAM, 250Gig SATA, DVD+/-RW, ADSL, and a nice 32" LCD TV.

From what I can gather, all I really need is a good TV tuner card, and some software like this to do the EPG programming, recording etc.

After that, I could replace my board with a micro/mini atx and buy a nice HTPC case, but this isn't necessary.

Can someone please confirm I'm correct, tell me if there's any software that lists programmes on the Sky satellite system (software above seems to do US programming only), and offer any other advice.

Thanks in advance.

spartacus93

Read this http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=208020 . Read it all some top quality info in there!

Tom Dunne

I'll do my usual pimping of Media Portal. Also consider GB-PVR.

With Media Portal, you plug in xmltv which downloads Irish (and of course, English) TV listings, the end result is much like Sky+. If you have two tuner cards, you can watch one channel while recording another. You can also listen to radio (net and FM), Mp3's, watch DVD's, read RSS feeds, check the weather, and even play tetris!

One thing, make sure you are very, very dedicated. You will experience a lot of frustration during the initial phase with codecs and the like, but the results are worth it.

Khannie

Also consider "myth tv" (google it). It's flippin' amazing if you can get it to work properly (I did for a while and will be doing so again). It also uses xmltv so you can download listings.

You should consider a hardware mpeg encoder too. The hauppauge pvr-150 or pvr-250 (the 150 is not a lesser card than the 250).

edit was semi-swear word removal. Oopsie.

m_stan

thanks for the info.

would an XFX NVTV Mpeg2 Tv-Tuner do the trick ?

aidan_walsh

Khannie wrote:

It also uses xmltv so you can download listings.

I've been looking into that, but the problem is I can't find any XML-TV provider that does decent Irish listings? You haven't found one by any chance, have you?

pH

Is there any way to use the Sky EPG to initiate the recording? By marking the programs and then getting a PVR to record everything if there is a signal?

The problem with this is that the stored programs list would not know what channel/program was recorded.

Failing that how easy is it to get the PVR software to turn on the Sky box and change the channel? I presume they use some sort of remote emulator?

I've read that the best capture card for Sky is sweetspot as it does RGB, has anyone used this or got it working with a PVR?

Tom Dunne

aidan_walsh wrote:

I've been looking into that, but the problem is I can't find any XML-TV provider that does decent Irish listings?

The Radio Times in the UK does Irish listings, that's what I am using for Media Portal. All four stations are there.

pH wrote:

Is there any way to use the Sky EPG to initiate the recording?

There is no way to connect them up, apart from the obvious SCART connection. The way round it is to set Sky to Autoview a TV program and have the PVR record at that time from the SCART input. Not ideal, but I don't know of a better way. The PVR software on the PC would have the name of the TV program you have just recorded.

Khannie wrote:

Also consider "myth tv" (google it).

The only thing about Myth TV is that you are fairly limited by what hardware you can use (seeing as Myth TV runs under Linux). That means no USB devices (I've got the pretty cool USB2 Hauppauge PVR250). I don't want to start a flame war on Windows vs. Linux, but suffice to say I would consider myself fairly computer literate and I just gave up out of sheer frustration.

rogue-entity

Well I will agree, Linux, while superior to Windows in most ways, is hampered by the fact that it is open source. Hardware makers do not wish to release details of there systems, these are needed to write drivers for a given OS. Linux coders have to reverse engineer these details in order to get hardware to work esp when hardware makers ignore standards. In an ideal world hardware makers would either release technical specs sufficient to make stable drivers, or create them themselves.

As for the PVR thing, I am also interested in creating a PVR system, similar to the XP Media Center system. I would use the XP system if it supported analogue tuners and supplied TV listings from a good source, and worked in ireland. Failing that Linux works nicely as well. I just need to decide which system that I will use, MythTV or Media Portal.