Penguin PVR cometh…

Yesterday I left work early because I had to flex my time from this weekend. I got off work about 1:00 pm and headed home.

Since I decided not to pursue a laptop right now, I had returned to my interest in creating a Personal Video Recorder (PVR, think Tivo) from my Linux machine. I finally decided to spec out the hardware that I needed to make this happen. I only needed two items, a Hauppauge PVR-350 TV Tuner card (best in the market, has TV-out and the whole nine yards) and a larger hard drive.

Now, before I get to the specs of the hard drive understand that compressed video takes up a LOT of space. Average systems using the software that I will use get an hour of recorded TV in 700 MB to 2 GB based on type of compression.

I decided, with help of one to go with a 160 gigabyte 7200 rpm Western Digital IDE drive from New Egg. It has an 8 MB cache on it too, which should make for some speedy writing. A little simple math on the average size in MB yeilds between 215 and 75 hours of TV, depending on compression selected (I factored in 10 GB for OS and MythTV software). I am not above adding a twin drive to this thing once it is complete.

I will likely take my old hard drive from that system and put it into my Windows machine, as I’d rather harness the entire benefit of the cache and rpm speed instead of playing the mix/match game with the different hard drives.

So I decided to place my order. The grand total was just under $300. If this works like it is supposed to, it will pay for itself after a few months of use. An 80 hour Tivo costs about $150 with rebate, but you have to have a monthly subscription cost of $29. My system will require no such monthly fee, as it uses XML TV listings taken from another Open Source Project.

I’m pretty excited about this project mostly because it gives me something else to do with my free time aside from annoy my dear wife. 🙂 Anyone interested in doing the same thing as I am can check out the MythTV website, or the more Fedora specific website that I will be consulting.