[DMCA-Activists] Do It Yourself TiVo

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from Pho list)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: pho: Building a TiVo, a Step at a Time
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 14:44:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: John Parres <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden

Building a TiVo, a Step at a Time  
By Leander Kahney 
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59088,00.html

02:00 AM Jun. 04, 2003 PT

Forget TiVo and ReplayTV. If you want a really super-duper digital video
recorder, you have to build your own. 

All you need is knowledge of Linux, plenty of cash for hardware and, if
anything goes wrong, hundreds of hours to troubleshoot the device. 

Thanks to several open-source projects, you can build your own digital video
recorder that will blow boxes from TiVo and ReplayTV right off the shelf. 

About a dozen collaborative software projects are in the works that will
transform a spare computer, or one built from off-the-shelf parts, into a
homemade digital video recorder, or DVR. 

Given the right hardware, most homemade DVRs will do everything expected of
a digital VCR: They pause and rewind live TV, and automatically record
favorite shows week after week. 

They also can record multiple shows simultaneously, archive shows to video
CD, play digital music and computer games and display photographs and local
weather forecasts. 

Boxes from TiVo and ReplayTV offer some of the same functions, of course,
but they charge extra for features like programming information, streaming
music and displaying photos. 

"I always wanted to buy a TiVo, but I thought it would be pretty cool to
build my own," said Isaac Richards, who runs MythTV, one of the most
complete home-brew DVR projects. "Trouble is, I definitely don't watch as
much TV as I did before I started this project. It's more fun to work on it
than it is to watch TV." 

Richards, a 25-year-old programmer from Cleveland, launched the MythTV
project a year ago with the idea of building a simple, highly configurable
DVR. 

Thanks to the combined expertise of about half a dozen hackers from all over
the world, the project is close to assembling a complete software package
for homemade DVRs. Version 0.9 of the MythTV software is due out next week. 

Based on Linux, the free software features an easy-to-use graphical
interface, which can be navigated with a standard remote. 

The MythTV software offers all the basic DVR features -- it can pause and
rewind live TV, and fast-forward through shows and ads. It supports multiple
tuner cards (and multiple simultaneous recordings) and boasts
picture-in-picture capability if there's more than one tuner card installed.
It also offers basic video-editing capabilities and allows shows to be
archived to video CD. 

MythTV grabs programming information from the Net using XMLTV, an
open-source project that scrapes television listings off the Zap2IT website. 

The software supports a wide range of hardware. It can make a fairly basic
device out of a spare computer, or an über-DVR that can record hundreds of
hours of programming and up to four programs simultaneously. 

For example, Raffi Krikorian, author of a forthcoming book called TiVo
Hacks, is planning to build a MythTV DVR from scratch that will record two
shows at the same time, store about 250 hours of programming, play DivX
movies downloaded from the Net and archive shows to video CD. The DVR also
will record radio and play MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other audio formats, while
grabbing free programming information from the Web. 

Krikorian estimates the parts for the device will cost a cool $1,200 --
about three times the price of a top-end TiVo set-top box. 

"If you want something that just works, a TiVo is your best bet," said
Krikorian. "But if you want to build something, (MythTV) is the way to go.
It's like building your own car. You can customize it however you like." 

Krikorian, a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, put an offer on his blog
last week to build a MythTV DVR for anyone willing to cough up the money for
parts. He got about 35 offers. If the offers hold up, he plans to assemble
them in coming weeks after getting the first one up and running. 

MythTV has a nifty distributed architecture that allows multiple machines to
work in concert, recording and streaming shows to each other over a home
network. Controlled by a master scheduler, the recording and playing of
shows on multiple devices is "completely transparent" to the user, according
to Richards. 

Robert Kulagowski, a networking engineer and a MythTV contributor, has three
MythTV DVRs scattered around his Chicago home. Working together, the devices
can record four shows simultaneously and store up to 300 hours of
programming. 

"My wife and my mother-in-law both use it, no problem," said Kulagowski.
"It's very easy to find programs to record. It's very flexible." 

Kulagowski estimates he spent about $600 on building his three DVRs, and
just a few hours setting them up. "A motivated amateur could get MythTV
operational," he said. 

However, others warn that building a homemade PVR is not always so simple.
Hardware that is not supported by Linux can throw a hacker for a loop. 

"It's not easy to get running," warned Richards. "This is one of the more
complicated things you can do on a computer. It definitely requires some
knowledge of Linux to get installed and working properly, though we've tried
to make the process as painless as possible." 

There are about a dozen home-brew DVR projects, all based on Linux. Others
include Freevo, eBox and the Dave/Dina Project. Krikorian said MythTV was
probably the most complete and up-to-date. A list of the projects can be
found at the Linux PVR Depot, which also maintains a database of the
hardware used by various people. 

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