I don’t believe in using VCR’s, yet I want to record TV. So, do I pay $20 more per month for a DVR? Naaah… If you have a little time, an old PC laying around, and about $60 in cash(pays for itself in 3 months), you can make your own DVR.
My setup:
- Pentium III 1 Ghz Dell
- Debian Sarge
- Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE TV Card
You could use a program such as MythTV to give you a great interface, but the only drawback is that it creates non-mpeg files.. which is bad for me because I want to compress them and store them. So I just use the built in encoder in the TV Card and create MPEG-2 files.
So, all I do is use the “cp” command (for example: “cp /dev/video0 test.mpeg”) and schedule that command to run for the length of the show, then kill when it is over.
This is my record script that I run for the show Lost:
And this is my crontab. The schedule is at the bottom:
It’s as easy as that! Questions?
January 17, 2006 at 10:55 pm
Why pay a fee for DVR service when you have Linux…. How about because you dont have to sit down at a computer and schedule cron jobs to record your shows, or know how long they are on, or even know when they are on because you can look at your onscreen guide via your remote control. MythTV is probably the most popular linux DVR answer, but there are others available: Freevo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net/), DVR (http://dvr.sourceforge.net/), or if you’d like to go the windows route and still stay free I would suggest MyHTPC (however they now have a commercial product meedio) or MediaPortal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net)….
January 18, 2006 at 7:39 am
I sort of agree. If you are recording tons of TV and need to do it quick, buy a DVR or use MythTV. If not, the way I have it setup is good enough and the price is right.
January 18, 2006 at 7:40 am
Wow.. that second image is really horrible. Woops.