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The acronym PVR stands for Personal Video Recorder.
Basically, it's
what a TiVo is: a system
that will record television shows onto a hard disk.
But instead of buying a TiVo and paying the monthly charge, I made
my own through the magic of the MythTV program for Linux.
MythTV lets you put together a system that will record programs
like a VCR, but makes it easy to schedule recordings with a
full program listing. You can also pause live TV and it'll
keep recording it for you so you can resume watching it at
any time. But MythTV goes beyond this basic TiVo functionality
by adding a music playing function, video game emulation,
image gallery viewing, and even a weather information module;
all on your television. Although, the best feature would have to be the ability to
completely skip commercials.
Here's the hardware that I used to construct this media box: Mini ITX box, Zotac IONITX board (Atom 230), 2GB RAM, 500GB HD. I now record only off of the air (antenna) for HD programming using a HD Homerun.
Links
- Controlling a DirecTV STB via USB
- MythTV Contributions (local)
- Installing MythTV (somewhat old)
- MythTV
11.16.09
Dropped DirecTV, got a new Myth box, and now only record OTA HDTV using a HD Homerun. Very nice setup and I can
finally record/playback HD content!
Using MythTV 0.22 on Fedora 10.
It was a little sad powering down my Shuttle that served me so well for over five years, but it was time to move on.
7.07.06
Made the switch from DISH to DirecTV, and got the new channel changing script
to use a direct serial->USB connection instead of the infrared device I had
to use with the DISH box. Much more reliable on channel changes now.
Upgraded my SVN version and got MythArchive (mythburn's replacement) working. w00t!
Here is the script for DirecTV HD receiver model H20 channel changing
if you need it: directv.pl.
5.12.06
Got mythburn all configured and working, so now I can easily
export shows to Video DVD. It makes animated menus, has a cool
intro movie, and is easy to use.
myth2ipod still works great for exporting to my video iPod.
Finally, it all comes together.
1.14.05
Thanks to this page, I was able to
compile mythfrontend for my iMac. Now I have a nice 20-inch
widescreen Myth frontend added to the mix (master backend/frontend,
plus three frontend machines). I also finally got my
Avermedia M179 hardware MPEG2 encoder card working on a fresh
install of Fedora Core 3. Finally my old RedHat 9 Myth box
has been upgraded. Since I had all my recordings in a separate
160GB drive, I just moved that over and didn't lose any old
recordings. Big thanks go to Jarod for his guide.
9.24.04
I finally solved my IR transmitter problem. I have been using a
homebrew IR transmitter with lirc for a while, and every now and
then it would miss a digit on a channel change. Very frustrating to
pull up the latest Stargate SG-1 recording and find an hour of Mexican
fiesta music instead. Not that there's anything wrong with
Mexican fiesta music, but it's not what I was expecting.
So I ordered a
MyBlaster
and used Bill's great perl scripts
to control it. No more lirc, and more importantly, no more missed
channel changes!
6.24.04
My Shuttle box has been running a bit hot, so I bought a new fan
from endpcnoise.com.
I got the 80mm Nexus fan, and it is *really* quiet. And I thought
the stock Shuttle fan was silent... Not only is it absolutely
noiseless, but it provides better air flow, keeping the box nice
and cool. Oh yeah, and a month ago I bought a 160GB hard drive,
bringing the total space up to 240GB. I have it partitioned such
that I can store about 160 hours of video recordings now.
The rest of the space is for my music, video, and game collections.
2.10.04
Got my Myth box hooked up to my Sony HDTV using component RGB cables
and this converter box.
Now I have the output from my Myth computer displayed in true 720p
HDTV resolution! BTW, for those interested, the modeline I ended up
using is:
ModeLine "ATSC-720p" 74.176 1280 1312 1376 1650 720 722 728 750
2.8.04
I updated the streaming music patch against CVS as of Feb 8. You can
grab the files here:
musicstream.020804.patch.tar.gz.
Included is a .diff file for existing files in the mythmusic tree along with
two new files you need (shoutcaststream.[cpp|h]).
SomaFM is back!
12.11.03
Thanks to the great little patch to MythMusic by Stefan Franks, I'm
now able to listen to streaming MP3 music. Finally,
Groove Salad
in MythMusic. You can grab the patch
here.
See the original post on the dev list
here.
11.19.03
Rebuilt my Myth box from scratch because of a weird hard disk failure that
corrupted some random files. Took the opportunity to update to the sleek
them by Joel Feenstra. Check it out
here.
Also of note is the up-and-coming
MythBayes
project.
07.12.03
Finished up the small IR transmitter circuit so that th Myth box
can change channels on the Dish Network receiver. I used the
circuit found at lirc.org.
I think I can call my Myth box complete now.
06.10.03
I created a new theme for MythTV. It's available on my local
contributions page.
It's kinda purple/grey in colour.
06.03.03
The myth box has been working well. Got the IR receiver hooked up
so I can navigate around the Myth interface with my Sony universal
learning remote. Now I'm in the process of building a custom IR
transmitter to control my DISH sat receiver. The
ActiSys IRDA device I got can only transmit
at 38KHz and the DISH network box expects a 56KHz signal. Right.
03.11.03
The Myth box successfully recorded Seinfeld
for me last night. Victory!
The music module is also now working after I reinstalled
with RedHat 8.0 instead of the newer 8.1beta. Still waiting
on that IR interface, though.
03.04.03
So far I have the image gallery, weather, game, and tv modules working.
The two remaining issues are 1) cannot change channels from
within MythTV because my serial IR device hasn't been delivered yet
(so I can't make my computer send signals to my Dish box),
and 2) the music module has some GUI lock-up issues.
02.30.03
The CPU was delivered today, and so it began. A full write-up
is available
here.
02.27.2003
The Shuttle XPC,
memory, and hard drive were delivered today.
Still waiting on the CPU and the IR tx/rx.
02.20.2003
Got the CVS version of myth installed and working.
Detailed instructions on getting/compiling the CVS (up-to-date) version
are here.
I also upgraded to version 0.5.8 of XMLTV. I also started experimenting with
lirc but it's a little difficult with the IR hardware still on order.
The tuner card
takes broadcast or cable signals and can select channels
internally. The satellite feed off my Dish Network is an encrypted MPEG-2
stream which must be decypted by the receiver box. Therefore
all channel changing must take place on the sat box itself. In order
to make this work, MythTV supports having an external command change
channels instead of the internal tuner channel selection.
So, using Lirc and a serial
infrared transmitter/receiver, the computer can change the
channel on the satellite box by sending IR commands like a remote
control. Also, using the IR receiver lets me control the computer
with my Sony programmable remote.
02.13.2003
Got an ATI Wonder TV VE tuner card for $39. So I started by installing
the 0.7 release of MythTV to try it out.