Building a BTV PVR on the CHEAP!

[CelShader]

Thought I would chime in to report my success in creating an extremely low cost Beyond TV box. For anyone else who is looking to build one of these on the cheap, keep reading.


System:
AMD Athlon 1.2 ghz w/ 384 MB RAM about $60 on ebay
ATI Radeon 9550 (128 MB VRAM) about $55 on ebay
Hauppaugge 401dbx Tuner about $35 on ebay
200GB Hard Drive $60 after rebate
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TOTAL: $210

I attempted to build my system from an old 1.2 ghz AMD athlon Compaq computer I had lying around, but you can pick up a comparable system in the $50-100 range.

The ATI Radeon 9550 was purchased because the integrated graphics card in the Compaq did not support DirectX 9, which is required for most all Windows based PVR software packages, except Intervideo's horrible WinPVR. The card is a Diamond Stealth S120 (radeon 9550). It supports RCA and SVideo output.

The Hauppauge 401dbx is a good choice because it supports both television and radio, and it has a BTV compatible remote control packaged in with it. The 21 button remote has all the essential functions for running BeyondTV, but not much more.

200 GB of storage net me about 190 hours of recorded TV at my optimal video quality. Heres where the low end system takes a bit of a hit... In order to get smooth playback and recording at the same time I used the Divx Portable (medium) setting. By no means is the quality horrible, but there are some noticeable artifacts and the very occasional frame-skip.

MPEG2 was out of the question, because even at low quality, when I attempted to record and watch at the same time there were too many issues with both the audio and video. The low quality Divx actually seems to produced a sharper picture than the fuzzy "fair" quality MPEG2, but its a trade off since there are more artifacts.

All in all, its very watchable. When it comes to TV quality, i'm not a stickler. I only have an ancient 21" Sony Trinitron from the early 90s for TV. I save my HD set for XBOX360 and DVDs.

Tips:
-Run Windows 2000 rather than XP to preserve resources
-Run at 640x480 for the same reason
-Make your "Shows" folder an SMB-Share. Now you can watch on any computer in your network, or on Xbox Media Center
-The "Overlay" guide option does not work when playing through a TV, use the hardware excellerated guide.


Ive had it up and running for 4 days straight with no real issues so far.

Anyone else out there runing an upderpowered PVR with tips for me or anyone else thinking of saving a little money?

[Mistergq]

What is a Hauppage 401dbx?

[CelShader]

Sold now as WinTV-Radio with the full size remote. You can pick up this discontinued version a bit cheaper.

Description on Compuplus

On ebay

[mapleleaf]

Look at my signature for my setup details. It is an old crappy P3 computer, however, I HAVE NO video quality issues while recording from 3 sources at once and watching prerecorded show on the same machine. I record everything in MPEG 2 with best quality setting. As long you have hardware MPEG 2 encoding TV tuner and video card with hardware MPEG 2 decoding almost any reasonable computer will do the job…