Why can’t I, with my own computer, hard drive, and video card, make my own version of Tivo?
I figure it’s a fairly straightforward program and you could set your system to go out to TVGuide.com to pull tv schedules, but you’d have a lot more upgrade-ability, HD-size-wise.
I’m sure this has been done, and I know Matrox makes a card, but it seems there should be cheaper ways than plunking down $230 on a card.
Guess I should have surf/searched a bit more, I found some answers myself.
The hardware would be pretty easy. However, the software is really complicated. It has to organize, prioritize and reshuffle all your requests on the fly.
BTW that’s all that the TiVo company makes, the software that runs them not the boxes themselves. They’re made by Philips.
And you can upgrade the TiVo hardware yourself (i.e. add bigger harddrives etc.) There are tons of websites and lots of freeware devoted to it.
In terms of having a stand alone, dedicated appliance, buying a TiVo unit is going to be cheaper than building a PC that does the same thing.
Thanks, Ants.
My PC can record stuff off the TV just like my TiVo can, but I never use it. Why? The picture quality is really lousy. Why?
My PC runs XP, virus protoection, a firewall, is checking for e-mail and all the other rubbish most folks use.
My TiVo is a Linux box that is solely designed to record stuff off the TV. That’s it.
TiVo wins!
Not to mention the dedicated hardware MPEG encoder. However, if you processor is faster than about a GHz, you should be able to keep up with a TiVo. Maybe the problem is your vid card?
You might find Freevo of interest:
It is definitely possible to do this. PC Gamer had an article on this. However, I don’t think their solution used the TiVo service but something like it. They mentioned that the alternative was not as simple to use as TiVo but not too bad overall and there were some benefits to this setup. I can dig up my copy if you like for some further details.
However…I have a related question of my own.
I have a HDTV and satellite (DirectTV) setup that will receive HDTV shows. Is there anyway I can record the HDTV programming ala TiVo style via a PC? I realize HDTV programming would require a much larger storage capacity but that problem is easily solved. It’s getting the signal to my PC and then back again to my TV along with the DirectTV decoding (legally) to see this happen that is tripping me up.
HP is now selling PC’s with a specific version of Windows, Media Center Edition, that has all this software on it. It doesn’t seem to be available from other than them, yet. There’s some video cards being marketed directly at this task, too. Some include software… There’s some nice cases that look just like stereo equipment, too.
Here’s an article from Extremetech (May 2002) on how to build a “Home Theater PC”, including Tivo like fuctions and MP3. Here’s another one.
My coworker built a Video/Music system himself. It had nearly 800 CD’s worth of music in it & included the “PVR” (Personal Video Recorded) fuctions, too. He had a wireless keyboard & mouse for control. It ran a Linux OS.
He’s now considering building a 500G Raid-5 array to store yet more media on.
Once built, you don’t pay a subscription fee to Tivo and they don’t spy on what you watch. Disk-based PVR’s will be the next big thing[sup]TM[/sup] in video, IMO.
If you’re looking for an inexpensive DVR, I would say to look on the web for a reconditioned TiVo. I got a 12 hour one for about $129. It works great and I never have any problems with it. I would imagine that any PC based DVR would be plagued by glitches of one sort or another. You don’t have to subscribe to the TiVo service if you don’t want, but that means you don’t get the TV guide features. You can still manually record by time and channel.
The Extremetech art. looks good, I’ma look into that. Thanks, Belrix.
There may be several reasons why you wouldn’t want to. I suggest perusing the extensive info found at www.avsforum.com.
As technology marches on, though, the other duties a PC performs will become less and less an issue. In the future, paying extra for a machine that is deadicated to recording TV shows might be just as silly as buying a typewriter.