Home built DVR/PVR
I just can’t seem to help myself. I just keep taking on projects. Hopefully some of my older one’s will come together before I completely drown or they have to haul me away in a straight jacket.
Last fall during college football season, we had to be away for a weekend when my Cornhuskers were on tv. We have 3 VCR’s in the house, but I don’t think more than one works. So I looked around, running a computer business, I have lots of them laying around. I even had a couple of TV tuner cards sitting on the shelf that we took out of long dead Windows Multimedia PC’s.
So I thought what the heck let’s build a DVR. I did a little research and came upon Mythtv and looking further I found mythbuntu which is a Ubuntu distribution with Mythtv already rolled into the distribution.
So I took an old HP PC I had laying around with 1GB of ram and added a 1TB hard drive and a couple of Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 cards in it and viola, we had a combo front end/back end DVR. We put that in the basement and then took another old HP pc and built just a front end that I put in the living room.
Well it went over real well and the kids really love it. Problem is the old PC that I used for the front end is big, bulky and noisy. So this evening, the XYL was trying to clean up in that room and finally had enough. I went in and discussed it with her and offered to build something new in a smaller size.
So I spent and hour or two researching and finally decided on a Shuttle XS35GT-804 It has 2gb of ram, a DVD Writter, 500GB HD and a dual core processor all in a what they call a 1 liter package. I got it for about $369.00. I added a wireless remote for another $20.00. I will load mythbuntu up on it and we should be good.
See what happens when you just want to record a football game!