Forget TiVo, build your own DVR/Media Center! (Part 1 of 2)

For the past number of years, TiVo has been all the rage because of it’s ability to record/pause/fast forward and rewind live TV.  TiVo is great for the everyday TV fan, but what do you do when you watch an excessive amount of TV and have an odd obsession with recording all of it, including a few of the crappy made for TV movies?  After a while, the hard drive in your TiVo will fill up and you will have no choice but to start deleting some of your beloved shows.  Well, if you’d like to avoid this sure to be tragic situation, you should look into building your own expandable DVR PC.  Not only will your custom build be able to handle the watching/recording/pausing/fast forwarding and rewinding that a standard TiVo unit can, but you’ll also have the added convenience of an entire media center interface that will very effectively handle music and video content.  All of this, while a little bit pricier than a TiVo unit, is well worth the price.  The only real question would be; what do I need to get started? 

The first thing you will need in order to build your own DVR PC, is a plan, though, this is really essential for anything in life, so we’ll assume that you already have one.  If you don’t, you’re probably going to waste a lot of money and end up being unhappy with your new toy.  Hopefully in your plan, you’ve taken a look at some hardware for building the system.  If not, I’ll give you a little overview, with some examples of what I used to build my system.  Let me just say, if you know how to find good deals, you can accomplish this for well under $500, especially if you’re just converting a PC you already have (than it will probably cost you under $200).

To start, if you already have a PC that you want to convert into a DVR/Media Center, than this will probably be really easy and cheap for you.  The first question you want to ask yourself is “do I have enough storage (hard drive space)?”  This is incredibly important when designing a system such as this because video content takes up a whole lot of space, quickly!  A one hour TV recording at a decent quality setting can take well over one or two gigabytes of storage.  For my personal Media Center, I only have a 160GB drive, which is plenty for the amount of TV that I watch and record, however you will want to adjust accordingly based on your TV habits.  With the price of hard drives down around $.30 a gigabyte, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to invest in a larger drive.  The next key component, if you already have your system setup is the TV tuner card.  You have a few options here including cards from ATI, Hauppauge, and Nvidia.  When it comes to this card, you don’t want to go too cheap or you will end up being disappointed.  ALWAYS look for a card that uses hardware encoding.  Basically what this means is that the card has a chip built on that will receive the video content coming in from your cable or antenna line and encode it to the proper viewing format before it is sent off to the display.  This is much more efficient than software encoding because it doesn’t use up CPU processing time to encode the video.  With the encoding part out of the way, your CPU time can be concentrated on properly recording the video to whatever format you choose.  Using a hardware encoded card will also allow you to use an older, slower system simply because it doesn’t need as much processing power to encode the video.  While these cards may be a little bit more expensive than their inferior counterparts, they are well worth the price.  If you have already purchased a card that is software encoded, you will likely have trouble recording video without it becoming jumpy unless you have a fairly new, fast computer. 

So, lets look a little closer at the individual brands.  I’ll start with Hauppauge, being as that is what I used in my system.  If you’re looking to stay cheap but still get a decent card, you can’t go wrong with the Hauppauge WinTV PRV-150.  This is an analog PCI card that comes complete with AV (red, white, yellow) connections and your standard RG-6 Cable/Antenna connection.  The card also comes with a nice Media Center remote.  This card IS hardware encoded, and works quite well on my AMD Athlon64 3700 System.  The one downside to this card is that is does not come with an FM tuner as some cards do.  Seeing as I rarely listen to standard FM radio, this does not really bother me.  This card, as with other Hauppauge cards that I have used is very responsive and is usually as quick switching between channels as a regular TV.  Another option is the ATI TV Wonder series or the ATI All-In-Wonder series.  Most, if not all of these cards have now been discontinued by ATI, however some of them will probably still work fairly well on certain systems.  For full details on each of the available cards, check the link above.  Remember, you’re looking for hardware encoding.  A final choice would be the NVidia DualTV MCE series cards, however these have also been discontinued.  From the information i’ve been able to find, the NVidia DualTV cards are all hardware encoded, and as you may have been able to tell by the name they include two tuners.  This would allow you to actually watch or record two channels at once, a feature that the more expensive TiVo units have.  These NVidia cards also include the NVidia PureVideo decoder.  While I have not tried this card myself, I have been told by others who have that it is not as responsive when changing channels as the Hauppauge card listed above, however this is only a minor flaw and i’m sure the dual tuner capabilites would make up for it.

As you can see, you have plenty of choices for standard analog tuner cards, but what if you want to build yourself a HD DVR/Media Center.  Well, for starters, you’re probably going to want even more hard drive space than you originally planned.  HD content takes upwards of 5 gigs per hour of recording.  You may also need to make some upgrades to your system because it takes more processing power to handle HD video.  If you take a look at the Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1600, you will notice that it requires a minimum of 2.2Ghz to run properly.  This is likely just for watching HD video content, recording may require an even faster processor.

Once you have purchased your new hardware,  you will want to install it and setup all the proper drivers.  As a simple overview for those of you who dont regularly do hardware installs, you will want to install any new hard drives as a primary slave.  While it may be more appealing to format the drive as FAT for use on other operating systems (such as linux), you should format as NTFS simply because it will support much larger files.  Install your new tuner card into an open PCI slot.  Once you’ve installed your hardware, you’re ready to move on to step 2, finding the right DVR/Media Center software. 

For those of you who do not have a PC already built that you could convert into a DVR/Media center, you will need a few more hardware items on top of the tuner card and hard drive: a case to hold everything, a power supply, some RAM, a motherboard and CPU, a video and sound card (if they’re not onboard), a CD/DVD ROM or writer and a monitor.  For my personal build, I was able to find a lot of these extra parts fairly cheap, either by purchasing them from friends or by looking around in the classifieds or at yard sales.  Listed below are the specs on my machine as well as where I found the part and how much I paid for it.

• Large white ATX case with CD-ROM, purchased from a friend: $15
• 17 inch Compaq monitor, purchased at yard sale: $5
• ATI x1300 video card, purchased from a friend: $30
• 1GB of Corsair ValueSelect DDR-400 RAM, purchased from NewEgg: $90
• 450 watt XClio power supply, purchased from NewEgg: $45
• Asus A8N SLI-Deluxe Socket 939 Motherboard, purchased from NewEgg: $105
• AMD Athlon64 3700+  2.2 GHZ, Socket 930 Retail CPU, purchased from NewEgg: $96
• Spare case fan, purchased from NewEgg: $5

Total (minus tuner card and hard drive): $391

If you model your system after this, you will have yourself quite a nice DVR/Media Center setup.  You may want to look into the newer processors and motherboards (AMD AM2 series) as they will be more up to date.  Also, if you’re looking to do HD viewing and recording, look for a faster processor and more RAM!

Final hardware tips:

• ONLY purchase a TV tuner card that is hardware encoded!
• Ask around for parts if you’re building a whole new system from scratch.  You would be surprised at the kinds of things your friends and family have laying around that you can use for your system.  It doesn’t have to be fancy, as long as it works for what you’re doing!
• While you can get by on 512MB of RAM, you’re better off using at least 1GIG, your media center will thank you.
• When purchasing your tuner card, be sure that it comes with a remote.  You wont be happy if you have to lay around with  your keyboard and mouse all the time in order to switch channels. 
• If you want your new media center to blend in with your current entertainment center, you can purchase special HTPC Media Desktop Cases which are more streamlined.

Check out part two here!

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