I have long wanted to build myself a PVR. I thought that it would be nice to be able to control what I watch, and when I watch it. Commercial alternatives are restricting their features too much for my tastes. I wanted a system that would give me full control over everything, even if it cost more to build.
My mantra is to always overdo things. I started out with a pretty powerful computer. It’s an Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice core) in an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard. I figured that it would be beneficial to HD playback, and any transcoding that I would perform.
I started wiith two HD-3000 high definition tuners. What I did not realize is that these tuners are great for HD, but not so great for normal TV. I had to put in a second sound card to capture the audio from the second tuner. I then had trouble setting up which tuner recorded sound from which sound card. I got frustrated after a while. There were also tons of glitches in the video. It turns out that these glitches are not the fault of the card. It seems to be something with the MythTV code and transcoding. I’m still having the glitches if I try to transcode video. MythTV also has problems detecting HD stations when they are in the clear on a cable system using QAM.
I caved in and purchased two Hauppauge PVR-150s. These have onboard MPEG2 encoders. (You need to use the IVTV drivers .) Everything is working great, except I’m having remote problems. I have three IR receivers, but only want to use one. The front of my case has a built-in VFD and IR receiver. It seems awfully flaky. (SoundGraph iMon that came with my SilverStone LC10M case) Each of the PVR-150 cards have their own ir receivers. They use the lirc_i2c kernel module from the lirc project. For some reason over time the active ir receiver will change from one card to the other. I need to figure out some way to specify that I only want to use one of them. Right now I am at a loss as to how. It gets a bit annoying when you can’t shut down your TV and you’re trying to fall asleep.
MythTV is a pretty good program. I am running one of their releases. My problems with the transcoding and detection of HD stations may very well be fixed in one of the SVN versions. I played with them for a while, but for now I’d prefer to wait for an official release.
I have been able to get remote computers to use the Myth box and run Myth Frontend. One of them is my iBook. It’s kind of neat to be able to go anywhere in the house or back yard and still have live TV.
The funny thing about all of this is that I really do not watch much TV. The things that I do watch are usually educational programs on the History channel, or the Discovery channel. I think I did it for the challenge of it all. I’m about half way there. If my family used it, the glitches would annoy them to no end.