Andy's Blog

Tivo, Schmivo

Every time I go to Chris's house, and see him using his Tivo, I want one. But every time, I find some reason (or 3) why Tivo just isn't right for me. Well, I was just at Chris's place at the end of July (for an entire week), and so he really had me on this whole Tivo thing. And then, last month, Tivo started offering some rebate thingy, which made it even more compelling.

But still, I resisted. I was going to write a long blog post about why I resisted, but instead, I'm going to write about the solution.

I have thought about just building my own Tivo-like device before, but I didn't think the end result would work well enough for me (I am a demanding TV user). But when I was up in Seattle, Fredrik told me that he built himself a MythTV box, and that it was working great. So, he totally sold me on it.

I've spent the last couple of nights surfing up PC hardware, because I don't really having anything suitable for integrating into my entertainment center. This whole project has kindof morphed into me buying a Cube PC, because I have always thought those things are cool. I would have bought one years ago, but I got into the whole Apple thing instead. Unfortunately, to assemble the Cube PC that I want would cost about $1k (when all is said and done). That is a little bit much for me to spend, considering I'm still not 100% sure that this is all going to work.

So, I decided to just go ahead and buy the cornerstone of the PVR, the TV capture card, and see if I could get it all working in my old dual Pentium-III 500Mhz machine. The card of choice amongst the Linux crowd is Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250. I saw over on Gizmodo that Circuit City is selling the thing with some massive rebates, so today I pulled the trigger on that. I had to go up to Hayward in order to pick the darn thing up, which was okay, because I got to throw Mike a bone.

So far, I have managed to install the card on my Windows XP partition, and in less than an hour, have it at a point where I could watch "The Daily Show". Over the long weekend, I will be installing Linux, and seeing if I can produce a workable prototype. I'll try it out for a few weeks, and if it seems like the whole thing is going to work, then I'll buy some sort of entertainment PC. This will also buy me some more time, so I can find the exact PC that I want.

It is gonna be great.

-Andy.

Posted by andyr at September 2, 2004 12:42 AM