Homemade TIVO

[iggybaseball]

I would like to make a small computer that would fit under my cabinet which is under my tv. it would play dvd's on the tv but i would also want it to copy tv shows to my harddrive. I have a haupaugge tv tuner but the recording quality is nothing near anything satisfactory. I want something that would record at the same quality as a tivo, otherwise i might just scrap the project. Any suggestions on the vid card?

[iggybaseball]

bump

[RainMaQer]

I think the best bet would be this one (http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products/pc/aiw_radeon_8500/index.html) . It's got the tv tuner and everything... but costs a pretty penny.;)

[It_The_Cow]

I don't think it may be the hardware, it may be software. What codec are you using now? If you want to try the software route, you'll need a pretty powerful machine to have good on the fly encoding. WinDVD worked well for me, but the trial had a 5 minute limit. It can record on the fly with MPEG-2 so the quality was pretty good and still reasonably small

[tbirdkiri]

the radeon is your best bet cause any other way is goin to cost about a grand.
i know i researched it.

[KFB]

ATI All-In-Wonder vidcards rock.
If I had few hundred extra $$ I would build a similar set-top box. A micro or flex ATX motherboard would be perfect. You could set it up with IR for a remote - sweeeeet.

[Mpegger]

Originally posted by tbirdkiri
the radeon is your best bet cause any other way is goin to cost about a grand.
i know i researched it.

You didn't research enough then. :D

I/O Magic PC PVR card. BT848 based software capture card. About $30 at CompUSA. Its actually a Pinnacle card (forgot which model) and does decent analog video capture. And since its software based, you can use any WDM compatible software and codec with it. It also comes with PowerVCR II Standard (not OEM like it says), so you can capture in Mpeg1 & 2. Get a remote like the X10 Mouse Remote, grab some free software off the net that will allow you to reprogram it and allow macros, a cheapo vid card that supports video overlay, a cheapo sound card and you got yourself a decent (if not really good) "Tivo-Comp".

You will however have to spend on a good cpu (1G+) and plenty of ram (at least 256mb), and if you can, either a striped Raid IDE setup with at least 40gig drives, or go full out with SCSI and SuperDuperUltraWide5 (whatever) drives, although a plain ATA100 7200 by itself sould suffice.

Check out http://www.digital-digest.com for abit more info on video capture and conversion. There used to be a really good forum there but it looks like its either down or gone.

[Edit] Nope. Not down. Just needed to update my DNS cache. :D
http://forum.digital-digest.com/

[Ebola]

i think my brother has the pinnacle card mpegger is talking about. works pretty good on his 400mhz pentium computer.

[iggybaseball]

but would the quality be good? u know, without skipping etc. for the extra vid card could i use a geforce 256? or would i need something better?

[Johan]

I just got the I/O Magic card and the Radeon 7500 for my HTPC; the chip on board is the bt878 chip. I use dScaler to scale and then send it to my projector. Currently, I only use it to capture from my VCR for VHS tapes and broadcast TV.

This setup replaces my Radeon VIVO card. The I/O & Radeon combo seems to work well but there is not a significant improvement in picture quality over using the Radeon VIVO's video capture/scaling; however, I haven't tweaked yet. I haven't done any recording yet so I can't comment on that aspect.

What type of display do you have? If you have a standard 480i direct view, any decent video card should be fine. If you're running a hi-def RPTV, I would recommend a Radeon like the 7200. Radeons are considered the best when it comes to DVD picture quality and they are my personal preference for usage in DVD computer playback.

For a sound card, this would depend on how you are going to hook it up. Do you have a HT system or are you using the speakers in the TV? The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz may be worth looking into. I use the Philips Acoustic Edge card and it works well for DD and DTS passthrough.

I don't think you will need a 1G P3 or so; an 800 would suffice nicely. However, a little extra processing power never hurts. For HDD, I've used ATA66/5400rpm drives with success but, if you can, an ATA100/7200rpm drive would be preferable, IMO. I don't see a need for SCSI or RAID setups.

Check out the HTPC section @ http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ for much more info.

[MechCD]

try using Dscaler. The wintv software is terrible and makes all kidns of wierd distortions appear. i think the newest version of dscaler allows capturing also. Capture quality would depend on what format you are saving the files as also.

[wildone]

The studio PCTV cards by pinnacle are fine ,I have one and my 350mhz k62 rendered on the fly just fine,also it has alot of different quality settings from vcr quility to video disk quality and alot of lower settings if you need them.The quality on the card is fine to me and you can encode in AVI,MPEG,or Real format.The software also allows you to set it to record just like a VCR timer and all.

wildone