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TIVO

S

ShinSa

Senior member
I'm trying to build a TIVO box.

Where would I start and what would I need?

Any help it greatly appreciated.
 
Unless you go really, really cheap, you won't save any money. Seriously, trust me on this one, I've built one myself and the final bill was...high. Moreover, the functionality of the home-built TiVO is almost guaranteed to not be as nicely integrated as a real TiVO. However, if you insist on a project like this, here are the components that I used:

Silverstone LC02 case w/220w PSU
Epia M10000, passively cooled
512MB Crucial PC2100
200GB Seagate 7200.7
Samsung SN-324 slim CD-RW/DVD drive
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250

My priority was silence, and a box that fit nicely into a component stack that would offer good enough performance and would also have DVD playback capabilities.

In the end, with careful shopping and bargain hunting, the parts cost about $550. Add an operating system (I used Windows XP Pro) and a media front-end (I used BeyondTV) and you could be looking at $700 or more. While it was a fun project, it took time to assemble and "get right" (i.e. modding the Silverstone PSU, finding an appropriate passive cooler, etc.), and then there were driver issues with the Hauppauge that needed to be ironed out. I realize the CPU on the Epia is pretty underpowered, but it runs cool; still, a more powerful CPU would be nice but you probably won't ever find a motherboard with all of those features in that small of a form factor. Finally, the hard drive runs very hot which makes me nervous, so now I'm looking for a 5400RPM drive to cut down heat and noise a bit. Trust me, there's a lot of trial and error. When you get a TiVO, there's none of this, from the time you open the box you can be recording on TiVO (I have a series 1) in a half hour.

The component changes I would have made would be a 5400RPM hard drive (or a 5400RPM laptop drive, which would allow more air to flow around it and would also have more mounting options), and possibly use a P3 Tualatin with a Socket 370 motherboard with decent integrated audio...but then you would be looking at more money since you would also need a video card with TV-out.

If I had to do it again, I probably just would have bought another TiVO and a separate DVD player.

Pete
 
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