Help me with an UBER BUDGET pvr type thing

[episodic]

Ok let me state in no uncertain terms what I want to do, because alot of ppl think grander than I am.

What I want is a box to sit by my tv in the bedroom.

I want to do the following with it - play dvd's, vcds, media files, etc from a dvd rom drive. I would also like to record some shows occasionally with it and play them back.


Here is what I was thinking:

A duron class chip 900-1.3ghz range (from fs/ft).
A pcchips kt266 motherboard for cheap from newegg
A 40 gig samsung harddrive - quiet, cheap, cool
DVD drive

One thing, I'd need to get by cheap on memory. If I do nothing else, would 128 megs suffice? The OS would be win2k


I won't be doing any transcoding etc on it. I would transfer files from my main rig to it on my ethernet network that I already did the transcoding work on.

Basically I just want a jukebox and a dvd/divx player.


Now here comes the quandry. I don't wanna have to hook up a monitor. Is there anyway to use the computer totally from the tvout? THIS is what I'm not sure of.

LMK what you guys would do. Keep in mind I'm not lookin for PVR functionality. . . just a good player basically.

 

[SearchMaster]

The answer is "yes", you CAN use the computer totally from TVOut.

However, unless you have a very nice video card and a pretty sharp TV as well, the quality sucks. It's fine for playing movies, etc., but if you want to do anything text-related (email, web surf, etc.), the quality is so poor it's very tough to read. I have a Radeon 9600, which was supposed to have pretty good TVOut, and a pretty nice 36" Panasonic Tau (nonHDTV) set; it's barely tolerable to try to use it as a monitor. Obviously if you're using DVI instead of S-video the answer should change (not seen it in action, but I'm sure the quality is vastly improved), but if you have just a standard TV, you won't be very happy with the results.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I would highly recommend going with another brand of board. Cheap is one thing, pcchips is quite another

 

[jbass]

Mac mini? 499$ and you are done

 

[SunSamurai]

tivo and dvd plaver.

 

[Zepper]

I agree w/ Radicl - they didn't earn the sobriquet "PC Cheaps" for nothing... Look for an Abit VA-10 on eBay or in the FS/T sections. It is quite a bit better than the KM266 based mobos and has better sound than most microATX, socket-A mobos. And video encoding can be CPU/memory intensive - I wouldn't want to start with anything less than a Duron 1600 and 256MB of DDR2700 (to allow for some FSB OCing). I got some very good RAM from Outpost.com for only $25. on sale a little while back - so watch the sales and start with a 256MB module and upgrade to 512MB ASAP.

.bh.

 

[episodic]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
tivo and dvd plaver.

I'm a cheap bastard. Don't wanna pay monthly fees.

 

[episodic]

Originally posted by: SearchMaster
The answer is "yes", you CAN use the computer totally from TVOut.

However, unless you have a very nice video card and a pretty sharp TV as well, the quality sucks. It's fine for playing movies, etc., but if you want to do anything text-related (email, web surf, etc.), the quality is so poor it's very tough to read. I have a Radeon 9600, which was supposed to have pretty good TVOut, and a pretty nice 36" Panasonic Tau (nonHDTV) set; it's barely tolerable to try to use it as a monitor. Obviously if you're using DVI instead of S-video the answer should change (not seen it in action, but I'm sure the quality is vastly improved), but if you have just a standard TV, you won't be very happy with the results.

I'm not going to use it for text.

 

[DaveSimmons]

For recording, get at least 1 GHz CPU unless you spend $80-90 on a Hauppage PVR-150 card with hardware mpeg2 encoding, or are happy with VCR quality (352x240 resolution) instead of high res.

You might consider one of those Sempron / motherboard bundles from Outpost.

Win2000 will run fine with 128MB, but if you're using a software encoding TV card like a $40 leadtek I'd expect glitches unless you move up to 256 MB.

If you just wanted to record and play DVD & VCD (no divx) you might be better off just getting a $150 DVD recorder.