What's the state of open source PVRs?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 03:16:23PM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Apologies if you received this twice, my system has had some mail burps 
> today.
> 
> I've been asked by a friend to set up a computer-based Tivo clone and I'm 
> curious to know what the status of things are in this field.
> 
> I notice that both MythTV and Freevo are actively being developed -- is  
> one clearly better than the other? Or is this another KDE/GNOME, 
> xine/mplayer "personal taste" kind of choice?

Mythtv seems oriented as a windows media center equivalant (at least),
and supports playing DVDs, watching TV, recording TV, having remote
clients and servers all talking to each other, playing games (with mame
plugin and such), viewing web pages, rss feeds, weather, etc.  It is all
in one.  I thought freevo was meant to mainly be just a PVR and not much
else, but I must admit I didn't look at it for quite a while.  If I was
building such a machine, it would have debian + mythtv on it, but that's
just me, and right now I have better things to spend my money on
(unfortunately). :)

> What are the best websites that talk about the various components?
> 
> I was considering something small and quiet -- a small Shuttle XPC type box 
> would be nice, but it has to be able to do good video, good 5+1 sound out 
> and  a possibility for multiple video capture cards (for  
> picture-in-picture or recording one show while viewing another). Maybe 
> something based on an Antec Aria case would be good, does anyone have any 
> other ideas? Is there other relevant software that works together with 
> MythTV or Freevo?

I think mythtv uses mplayer for some things, but I don't remember for
sure.  It has been a while since I poked at it.

A shuttle XPC seems like a very bad choice actually.  You actually
really want something that takes a full ATX board if you want multiple
capture cards, or at least a microATX to get 3 PCI slots and a video
card in there.  If you want good sound, you probably want to add an sb
live/audigy (make sure it is an alsa supported revision) to get fully
supported multichannel sound.  Some onboards work too, but I have no
idea what the quality is like on many of them.

There are cases out there with buildin LCD displays and IR ports and
which have linux drivers available for that hardware.  Some of them look
like they would be perfect for the job.

Len Sorensen
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