The Server Guy

A while back I built my own DVR (digital video recorder) and it has occurred to me that others may be interested in doing the same. The whole project was actually quite easy, although I am comfortable building a PC from components, and others may not be as comfortable. As I walk through this please keep in mind that while I was trying to keep costs down the object was to build (as easily as possible) a DVR that was simple to use, took up a minimal amount of space, and would be easy to modify if necessary.

I started with a spare PC I had sitting around unused. I realize most people don’t have a spare computer just sitting around their house. The point I’m trying to make is that the computer you use doesn’t have to be a top of the line system, especially if you are careful about choosing the components you’ll be adding.

The following is a list of the hardware components I started with:

• Shuttle PC
• Athlon XP 2000 CPU
• 512MB RAM
• 300GB hard drive
• nVidia GeForce 4600 video card

I started researching DVR software. I almost immediately found SnapStream’s product called BeyondTV. The software did everything I wanted and was reasonably priced. It ran on Windows and sounded easy to set up. As a bonus it could be purchased bundled with a tv tuner card. The bundled hardware was a Haupauge tv tuner card, specifically the WinTV-PVR-150. The card has built in mpeg2 compression so the PC’s processor wouldn’t be overloaded encoding the video. All in all it sounded like a great setup.

Since the bundled software and hardware I was purchasing was relatively inexpensive I decided to also purchase a Firefly remote which came packaged with Beyond Media. I didn’t know it at the time but the software nicely rounded out the whole system and ended up turning it into a full media center. Now I can use the PC to watch TV (live or recordings), listen to my whole music collection (ripped to mp3), view my digital photos, and even check the local weather forecast.

The Beyond Media software actually became one of our favorite features of this device. The ability to control a whole “media center” with one remote attached to one device is really a nice feature to have. Rather than powering on different stereo components and searching for the correct remote (or trying to figure out that universal remote) you can use a single remote to work with a single interface for any media.

Once all the new components arrived it was time to put everything together. The system was already running Windows XP, so I powered it off and added the new tv tuner card. Then I installed the latest drivers for the tv tuner card which were downloaded from the SnapStream website. The Firefly software was installed next during which I was prompted to plug in the base for the remote (USB device). Next the BeyondTV software was installed and configured. There were a few prompts for input like which device should be used for encoding/decoding, where should recordings be stored, quality of recordings, etc… nothing to difficult. Finally Beyond Media was installed.

After all the installation and configuration was complete it was time to move the PC into the living room and hook it up to the TV. The audio and video was run from the PC from the sound and video cards respectively to the stereo via standard component cables. Once everything was hooked up and running I got to try out my new DVR. I fired up the software and flipped to a local channel. It worked! I was looking at regular TV. Next I tried out some of the fun DVR features… how about pausing TV? It worked great. I quickly flipped back to the scheduling guide and picked some shows to record regularly.

Initially I figured the DVR would be great for recording shows when we couldn’t be home to watch them. I quickly realized it did much more than that. My wife and I were now free to plan other activities during the times we would normally be watching TV. We now generally take a couple hours three or four evenings a week to watch the shows we recorded. If we have a busy week planned we can catch up on our favorite shows over the weekend, or the following week if we don’t get to it before then.

One issue we noticed pretty early on was that we could either watch live TV with our DVR capabilities (pause live TV, rewind, etc) or we could record a different show that was on at that time. Don’t confuse this with watching a prerecorded show and recording another show at the same time… That worked just fine. We ended up adding a second TV tuner card. Since the system was so small and only had one PCI slot which the first TV tuner took up we ended up adding an external USB2 TV tuner card. Adding the second card worked out quite well because Beyond TV includes licensing for two TV tuners (additional licenses can be purchased at a reasonable cost). Update: BeyondTV version 4 lifted the restriction on licensing for tuners. You can now use an unlimited number of TV tuners at no additional cost.

The only other note I’ll make is that we do see minor performance problems when we’re recording two shows and watching something we recorded all at the same time. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising since all that activity is on a single parallel ATA hard drive. I’m confident that if we had a higher performance drive or better yet a RAID setup the performance issues on those rare occasions would vanish.

On a final note, if you are interested in building your own DVR, but you would like to see other options out there you may want to take a look at the following sites:

• Build Your Own PVR
• PVR Wire