Daily Cup of Tech

A friend of mine asked me if I could convert a VHS tape for time to DVD. I thought about it for a second and then told him that I could not. He got this “I gotcha!” look on his face and said, “What?! I never thought I’d see the day when you didn’t know how to do something with a computer!”

I replied, “Oh, I know how to do it. It’s just that I haven’t had a VCR in almost 3 years!”

And this is the case. With hardware and disk space being so inexpensive, I’ve had no real need to record anything on tape any longer! The VCR is dead! Long live the PVR!

A PVR is basically a computer that records audio and video. There are several of them out there with the TiVo being one of the most commonly known types.

“But this is a tech blog! Anyone can buy a PVR! We want to build one!” And so you shall.

MythTV is one of the most popular do-it-yourself PVR systems out there. They have a very extensive website and lots of information on creating your own system. Here is a list of features from their website:

• 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.
• 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.

I have also found a really good tutorial on setting up MythTV on Ubuntu.

I am in the process of getting hardware together so that I can build my own MythTV box. I will be documenting the process and putting a few articles together once it is all done!

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