While racking my brain trying to decide what to get my folks for
the holidays, I finally settled on a PVR. So I went to go look at
Tivos. Nifty gizmos, and they're only $200 now. Well that's great, except
they want ~$13 a month, or you can pay for ~2 years worth of service up
front ($300) and get lifetime service. This is all well and good, and
yes it includes software support and updates, but I can get the TV
listings online with XMLTV and the other toys that Freevo and the other
free PVR solutions use. For $5 a month, I wouldn't be writing this
e-mail, but $13, or $300 up front plus $200 for proprietary,
one-purpose hardware, whose future software updates may remove features
(which, as I seem to recall, has occurred in the past), is just too much
for a PVR for the folks. They can get half of a fairly nice stereo upgrade
for that price.
And then there are the "freedom" issues. With some sort of home-brew
PVR solution, you're not restricted by any sort of DRM nonsense. If
you really like something, you're not limited to the disk on your PVR.
You can burn things onto CD or DVD roms. Or slap them on that huge
160GB drive, over the network.
So I started looking at freevo.sourceforge.net and am reasonably
impressed. It seems to still be a bit rough around the edges, but
certainly promising.
Has anyone played freevo and/or MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org/) or
anything similar? Any suggestions for tiny hardware with about 3 PCI
slots (1 for NTSC output, 2 for TV tuners (for simultaneous viewing
and recording)). I'm probably going to clock the processor down some,
and attempt to go fanless, except for, perhaps, a quiet power supply.
Diskless too, although that may require an upgrade to Gig Ethernet
depending on the bandwidth consumption of the PVR.
Any suggestions?
-- Matthew MoenMicrosoft Exchange: Incontrovertible proof that sometimes you /should/ shoot the messenger.
----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:45:44 EDT