Building A HardDisk-Recorder Pc, ala VCR function to record shows on TV

**ghosthunter** · May 19th, 2005 05:28 PM

I'm planning to build a HDD recorder PC. Basically this will act like a video cassette recorder, in where TV shows are recorded based on a timer. Its something like a Home Theater PC but simpler in requirement since all I want is it would record my TV shows and be able to playback the shows later.

Currently I am doing experiments on my PC installed with a TV/FM tuner card and results are pretty good except for the file sizes I am ending up with. About 700 meg for 30 minutes at MPEG1 compression. Given I have 20gigs of free HDD space, I can record about 14 hours before it gets filled up. I can get better compression with MPEG2 or even WMA format but it would require a dedicated system and a faster CPU too.

I want the system to cost less than P15,000 (much less, if possible). That would include everything needed to make a basic HD-Recorder with an 80gig HDD hopefully. Maybe a Geforce FX5200 or even just a GF4 MX440 (with video out) if it could provide good TV playback. I assume sound would be from built-in motherboard to reduce costs.

Maybe you guys can give suggestions, specs and stuff I can use?

BTW, I want the unit NOT to look like a PC as much as possible so casing suggestings are also welcome. I was thinking of using a classic 286AT case (with the lid that flips up like a car hood) and painting it black, but thats just a though.

Eventually I plan to install a wireless LAN card into it so I can connect with it from my other PC (in the next room). But the cost of the wireless LAN will not be included into the primary build of the HD-Recorder PC.

**russpogi** · September 29th, 2005 04:52 AM

I think yan yung mga "Media Center PCs" that are offered in the market lately.

**oldblue** · September 29th, 2005 05:10 AM

Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender
Bring your Windows Media Center PC's digital movies, live and recorded TV, pictures and music out into the living room!

* Connects your Home Entertainment Center to a Windows Media Center PC through a Wireless-A, Wireless-G, or wired network
* Watch home or downloaded digital movies and browse your digital pictures on your television. Also watch, pause, and record live TV shows
*Listen to your digital music collection and Internet radio through your stereo system
* Select entertainment from on-screen menus with the easy-to-use remote control

**wildthing** · September 29th, 2005 06:16 AM

Okay na project yan...kaso yung budget mo parang maliit. MoBo cost about 2k-4k, HDD cost about 4k-5k, video card with tv and tv out is also about 2k-5k (merun na bang tv in na video capture? so you can just record whatever is being shown in the tv). Yung power supply malamang dahil modelo yan e 1k-2k ulit (hindi yata pede pang 286)....ubos na budget mo...ala ka pang CPU, monitor, keyboard, mouse and software (assuming you are using original softwares).

Pero magandang project yan, balitaan mo kami, take pictures too.

**1coolexrx** · September 29th, 2005 06:53 AM

Question for you ghosthunter,

What encoder are you thinking of using? I think that if you go MPEG-4 then you will have plenty of bandwidth, rather than MPEG-1 or 2. Just saying.

Anyway, it's kinda like Tivo functionality huh? Peace.

**bon** · October 3rd, 2005 12:43 PM

If you're trying to build a dedicated home-brew PVR, I think your best bet would be to install the absolutely free MythTV PVR OS. It has tons of features, including:

-Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.

-Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.

-Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.

-Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.

-Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping

-Grabs program information using xmltv.

-A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

-Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.

-Basic video editing abilities. Optional transcoding to remove the commercials from the video file to save space.

-Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card.

-Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.

-Program Finder to quickly and easily find the shows you want to record.

-Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI. (The first two screenshots are the default theme, the third is iulius.4)

-Browse and resolve recording conflicts.

-A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.

-Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.

-An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)

-An image viewer/slideshow application.

-A weather module.

-A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups

-A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.

-An RSS news feed reader module.

A very good video on how to install and use MythTV can be downloaded here.

Check it out! I'm not sure though if MythTV can automatically update to local TV skeds.

**IPSG_SlimShady** · October 3rd, 2005 01:11 PM

Biglang nabuhay itong thread na ito ah. Nung May pa pala itong question na ito.

Anyway, when recording videos captured from TV/Cable, it is nice to use DIVX compression codec. High quality videos, less disk space.

**ghosthunter** · October 6th, 2005 01:44 AM

the problem with using high compression codecs is the need of a faster CPU which will increase cost of the system. Keeping costs down, an older cpu was used (Pentium III 800mhz). This would limit codec to MPEG1 & MPEG2.

Large capacity HDDs (80gig or bigger) are pretty cheap these days too.

Anyway, I have stopped on this project for the meantime (which means no standalone HDD recorder system). The setup is currently residing in my current PC though and fully functional.