DVR on a PC

[Polishwonder74]

I've been thinking about getting DVR from my local Time Warner cable company here, but a couple days ago I read an article about using your PC to record/watch cable TV as opposed to old fashioned VHS and such. Plus, I think that there is a way to burn to DVD anything that you really want to save and/or share with friends.

So I looked over on Newegg and saw that for around $70 - $80 you can get a nice PCI card with a remote control. Furthermore, I have an older PC that is about to be retired and freshly nuked. So I was thinking that maybe I could scrape together the cash and give this a shot.

My question to you guys is, do you know how fast a system has to be to handle DVR? I'm looking at using an old AthlonXP 1400 on a good ol' A7N8X motherboard. I've got 80GB of hard drive to work with, but they are getting nice and cheap now, I see that a fast 200 GB or so can be had for around $70 or so should I get tight on space.

Also, do you guys know how much storage space DVR'd TV shows take up? Is Windows Media Center really the best OS to use?

Depending on how much the good peoples at Time Warner charge per month to use a DVR, a PCI DVR card could pay for itself pretty quickly. Does anyone have any experience with this stuff?

Thanks for humoring me!

:beer:

 

[jkresh]

The athlon xp should be ok for dvr service as long as you aren't worried about HD. Windows MCE or vista Home premium would be a good choice for the os as they have the features built in, or you could try myth tv with linux (free but more involved setup), or snapstream/sagetv, ... If you want to record premium channels you will still need a cable box and you will connect the cable box to the dvr card using svideo, if you only care about standard then you can just use a coax to connect to the wall and ignore a cable box.

I have a vista box connected to my comcast dvr, I mainly use the dvr for recording (as most of my recordings are in HD) but vista or mce 2005 both work pretty well and if I want worried about hd I wouldn't be paying the monthly fee for the dvr.

 

[Matthias99]

My question to you guys is, do you know how fast a system has to be to handle DVR?

With a hardware encoder card to do the heavy lifting in terms of recording (like a Hauppauge PVR-150), not very. With a cheap software encoding card -- going to MPEG2 isn't too bad, but recording straight to MPEG4 ('DivX') will probably be too much for an older CPU unless you are running nothing else at the time and are not trying to play anything back simultaneously.

Also, do you guys know how much storage space DVR'd TV shows take up?

Depends on the bitrate and format you record to. MPEG2 at what I would consider pretty good quality for standard-def content is 4-6Mbps -- that is, roughly 2-3GB per hour. MPEG4 will look pretty decent at about half that size (and even at under 1Mbps isn't horrific), but the Hauppauge cards (which I use) record only to MPEG2. The DVR program I use (BeyondTV) can recompress MPEG2 recordings to MPEG4 overnight, which I do for some shows.

Is Windows Media Center really the best OS to use?

Media Center is just an app that runs on top of Windows XP. There are other Windows-based alternatives (BeyondTV, SageTV), and the major Linux DVR program is MythTV. Many capture cards also come with simple applications for recording and playing back video, but they won't necessarily have nice program guides and coordinated recording from multiple cards, etc.

Depending on how much the good peoples at Time Warner charge per month to use a DVR, a PCI DVR card could pay for itself pretty quickly. Does anyone have any experience with this stuff?

My opinion -- having done it -- is that unless you like toying around with things and occasionally fighting bizarre problems, either buy a TiVo or rent a DVR from your cable/satellite company. The technology is pretty good, but it's not quite plug and play yet (though I have heard very good things about the Vista media center version).

An advantage of a homebuilt DVR is that you can take anything you have recorded and do other things with it -- burn it to DVD, for instance, or have a networked file share that will let you watch the recorded videos from other PCs. TiVo can do this (with limitations), but most cable company DVRs cannot. On the other hand, there is no really good PC-based solution for recording HDTV content from cable or satellite. They are starting to come out with PC tuners that can take a CableCard, but so far they are only available through OEM systems (and cannot be moved to other boxes) and only work with Windows Media Center. And early reports are that they're buggy.

 

[Pabster]

Yeah, Windows Media Center has the best interface and widest compatibility hardware-wise with various capture devices.

However, I always preferred SageTV. It isn't free, but I much prefer it to WMC.

If you want an open source "Free" alternative, MythTV is great. Look for KnoppMyth and give it a go.

 

[weeber]

Polishwonder,

What you're describing is pretty much what I'm running now. For the past couple of years, I've been using an old Athlon 1.4Ghz for my HTPC/DVR recording shows. I've also got 256 Megs of PC133 Ram, an Haupauge PVR150 turner card, an Nvidia FX5200 outputting via S-video, and about 120 Gigs of HD space.

As you can tell, this is just a system that I cobbled together out of old/cheap parts. However, it does work great, and now I wonder how I got by without it. It does fine for standard-definition TV, I have mine setup to record at about 3 Gigs/hour. I also have it setup to play avi's/xvids and MP3s off my network on my main computer. It does everything I need it to do fine. As others have mentioned, don't think about doing HDTV stuff with this setup, but if you're looking for an entry level system, it will work OK.

As for my software. I run WinXP as my OS, but I use SageTV (Click Me) for my front-end. My understanding is that Windows MCE does not record shows in standard .mpg format, so it's more difficult to burn recorded shows to DVD, but that may have changed. SageTV does record in .mpg, so it's convenient to use.

I will say, that setting up and using an HTPC is just as much of a hobby as it is a tool for recording. It does take time and effort to setup and maintain. There is not plug-n-play HTPC. If you're looking for something easy that just works out of the box, go with a Tivo or Cable DVR. If you want another hobby that happens to also have a useful purpose, an HTPC does great.

 

[jkresh]

MCe records in dvr-ms which is mpeg with a wrapper for drm (yes we all know drm is evil...), they have included buring software (made by sonic) since mce 2005 which can burn dvr-ms to a standard dvd. The only major issue you might have is if you record froma protected channel (ie HBO/SHOWtime...) then it might not let you record to dvd or play on another computer (though their is a simple way around this if you are ok with the guide data being incorrect). Basically if you want to record from a protected channel then set it to record over svideo on a different channel for the proper time period and just switch the cable box yourself (or set the cable box to turn to the correct channel), mce only knows what its recording based on teh channel it thinks its on not on the video coming through the svideo port so ... Also as those protected channels are not protected by microsoft but by the cable provider (comcast in my case) through the guide info, you might run into the same issues with snapstream and sage (probably not myth tv).

 

[Polishwonder74]

Wow!! Lots of great info, thanks guys!

So lemmie make sure I'm crystal clear on this:

It looks like Windows MCE isn't really necessary at all since I'd rather use software that will give me the option to spit out VCD's and DVD's with minimal struggling. I was under the false impression that Windows MCE did more useful stuff than it actually does.

Since most of the gruntwork of encoding the video is done on the PCI card, an old AthlonXP should be ok, unless I go to convert from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 (DVD) to burn it and save it, which will take a few hours. I'm kinda used to that, I use DVDShrink a lot to copy DVD's.

With any luck, my old-fashioned PATA 100/133 interface is up to the task of saving all that video, but I'll probably outgrow the 80 GB drive that is in there now unless I do a lot of converting and burning to DVD.

It also looks like as a bonus, it is possible to just use the computer's DVD player to play DVD's on the TV screen. I have to wonder if it is possible then, to pipe the sound from both cable-tv and DVD's through the computer's sound card and into some better speakers.

Does that all sound kind of correct?

Thanks again for your time, this is some pretty exciting stuff for me!

:beer:

 

[jkresh]

as I said mce/vista will spit out dvd's easily (its converter has been built in) and there are plenty of free programs that can convert dvr-ms to anything. It also has the best interface of any of the software and if you need an os for the machine anyway then its the cheapest (out side of myth tv).

Yes you can connect the pc to a better sound system, depending on your soundcard and your system, if you have a dolby digital encoder (nforce 2 or some sound cards) you can easily connect everything by optical, if not and if your reciever has 5 channel analog in then thats the easiest. you could also get a good surround sound pc set (creative labs, logitech) which for a small room would be fine.

 

[gobucks]

i thought about buying a MCE box but decided it would just be easier to rent the time warner box. If you have HDTV and/or digital cable, the TV tuners are expensive and you have a very limited selection. If not, you're probably still looking at $150-200 for the hard drive and tuner card. Compare that to the $8 per month you pay for the DVR, and it'll be cheaper to just rent the DVR until you get past around 2 years, by which point you'll probably want to upgrade your MCE anyways.

As for the time warner DVR, it's pretty good - not quite tivo, but hey, there's no upfront cost, and if they come up with a better model, you can simply send back your old one and get a new one without paying any extra. The interface they use is the Passport software, which is way better than the buggy SARA software that other companies use (that's actually one of the main reasons I dropped Wide Open West in favor of Time Warner). If you go the DVR route, just remember 2 things: 1) I think the HD model has a bigger hard drive, better outputs, and an external SATA slot, and it costs the same as the non-HD model, so I'd ask for it even if you don't have an HDTV, and 2) make sure you get the SA Explorer 8300 rather than the 8000, since apparently the 8000 is the worst piece of crap ever invented. Some areas have a bunch of leftover 8000s in circulation, and if you don't specify, you might get stuck with one.

 

[jkresh]

gobucks, you are correct in that HD on a pc is a pain (okurt should help but it does not appear to be ready for prime time, and you cant install yourself anyway).

 

[Arik5405]

I have a pretty decent computer

Athlon X2 4200
2gb Corsair XMS
500gig hard drive
Nvidia 7900GT
and so on...

I was wondering what kind of tuner card i should get that would allow me to use Vista Ultimate as a DVR and record in HD as well as SD and play it back on my TV. I have comcast cable and already am renting a dvr/hd box from them for $15 a month. We have another HDTV that we want to use but we dont want to spend another $15 a month for a second box. I dont want to spend $30 a month just for rental fees for 2 boxes on top of the cable/internet bill. Please let me know what card and where I could get it that would allow me to do the things i mentioned above. thank you all for your time!