Going to build a PVR-ish rig, comment on parts

[Electrode]

I'm thinking of building a rig to act as a sort of PVR. I have chosen these parts:

Case: Athenatech w/ 200W PSU
Optical: Lite-on 16x DVD-ROM
Floppy: Samsung
TV: Prolink PixelView Play TV pro
Motherboard: Chaintech 7NIF2-SUMMIT
CPU: Athlon XP Barton 2500+
Heatsink: Thermalright SLK-800U
Fan: 80mm Panaflo
Storage: Western Digital 20GB (already have)

Is there anything I'm forgetting? Have I made any bad choices?

 

[Electrode]

parts chosen bump

 

[dmw16]

Looks pretty good. Hopefully u can keep the barton cool and not have the whole thing be too loud, but w/ that HSF combo you should be fine. The only thing is 20GB isnt going to last you very long...

Also, how much RAM you going to be using?

 

[Electrode]

768 MB.

As for the hard drive, most of the storage will be done on my fileserver, which has over 600 gigs of space. I might even go with a 12 GB drive.

 

[Jeff7]

Isn't that just a TV tuner, and not really a PVR card? PVR cards, at least what I've seen, capture video to MPEG2, either in hardware (Hauppauge's PVR 250 and 350 cards) which really lightens the CPU load, or in software, like Leadtek's PVR card, but that probably takes a pretty quick CPU to encode in realtime, especially at full resolution. I only have experience with the Hauppauge PVR cards, and the hardware MPEG2 encoding is a really nice feature. Their drivers need work though; be nice if they were open source so anyone could fix the (numerous) bugs. Great hardware, lousy drivers. Go figure.

 

[Electrode]

1. A Barton 2500 is more than capable of realtime MPEG4 encoding. I did it with a Tbird 950.
2. I can't imagine MPEG2→MPEG4 being any easier on the system then YUV→MPEG4.
3. The original WinTV-PVR was fully supported by the open-source and very high-quality BTTV driver.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

I'd still suggest more storage. It's not like hard drive space is pricey at the moment, and in the likely event that capture-to-network doesn't fly well (dropped frames, anyone?) it's nice to have the scratch space to work with.

- M4H

 

[Electrode]

I can't think of anything I'd record that would take up 10 GB of space. Past experience has shown that, with the settings I normally use, disk usage is around a gig an hour.

Remember, there aren't any temp files involved here, I'm going straight from the TV card to MPEG4.

Besides, I had a strict budget of $500, which I just barely made it under with what I got.

 

[Chain777]

Electrode,

This link is somewhat OT from what you're asking, but if you go the third or forth page and see the post by Rich A, I think you can get some useful info on your question. This guy lives and breathes PC based PVR's.

Link

BTW, I should add that I own a Replay 5040 (upgraded to a 5160) which gives me 80 hours of recording at medium quality.

I've played around with PC based PVR's (latest being an ATI Radeon), and after getting this, I'll never look back. The capture quality is better than the ATI card, and the rest is just gravy...commercial advance, guide programming, internet video sharing, etc. And the best part is I got the unit for ~$290.00 + ~$80.00 for the HD upgrade. Not bad, considering I have a fully functional PVR (with NO monthly fees; life-time activation was included), a superb video capture device (I can download the captured video to my PC with very good FREE software via Ethernet), and a bonus 40GB Maxtor HD that came with the unit. You can still get one for about $400.00 while supplies last...commercial advance and internet video sharing are going away with the next generation.

 

[Electrode]

heh, the post right below it links to my v4l/mplayer FAQ.

 

[DrVos]

Have you considered getting a Barracuda IV 40GB? I know that with my PVR, noise was the most important consideration since a noisy computer can greatly detract from a television watching experience. It seems like you've got the cooling thing down, have you considered getting a fanbus of some sort? That way, you'd be able to find a happy medium between cooling ability and noise.

 

[ChefJoe]

Get a bigger HD and seriously consider a hardware based card like the 250.

I built a PVR box (Snapstream PVS) out of my old 440BX mobo. ABIT BE6-II 2.0, P3 1.1 (100FSB), 80 gig HD, Leadtek winfast tv 2000xp card, 512 mb of PC100. With the non-hardware based encoding, I couldn't do "on the fly" wmv encoding at a level I was happy with at anything above tv resolutions and a vhs-like quality (snapstream pvs 2.0 software). As a work-around, I've got that same system now running snapstream pvs 3.0 (really nice... almost a tivo gui and channelguide) with mpg2 encoding at tv-resolution, higher bitrate. I use about 2.5 gigs of space/hour that way. I can then re-encode into smaller formats, but you gotta have the space to start out with.... especially if you let your pvr record for a few days before dealing with the output.

 

[Byte]

Originally posted by: ChefJoe
Get a bigger HD and seriously consider a hardware based card like the 250.

I built a PVR box (Snapstream PVS) out of my old 440BX mobo. ABIT BE6-II 2.0, P3 1.1 (100FSB), 80 gig HD, Leadtek winfast tv 2000xp card, 512 mb of PC100. With the non-hardware based encoding, I couldn't do "on the fly" wmv encoding at a level I was happy with at anything above tv resolutions and a vhs-like quality (snapstream pvs 2.0 software). As a work-around, I've got that same system now running snapstream pvs 3.0 (really nice... almost a tivo gui and channelguide) with mpg2 encoding at tv-resolution, higher bitrate. I use about 2.5 gigs of space/hour that way. I can then re-encode into smaller formats, but you gotta have the space to start out with.... especially if you let your pvr record for a few days before dealing with the output.

Joe, have you tried reencoding yoru MPEG2? From what i been hearing, the 2000XP screws up the MPEG2 and you get horrible sync problems. Most of my video programs won't even open winfast MPEG2

 

[ChefJoe]

Using the snapstream software to go from mpg2 to wmv 7? hasn't had any issues. If you want, I can lookup the driver versions I'm using.