Non-TiVo PVR Hardware/Configuration

[WarrenToomey]

Over in the oztivo mailing list, Peter Gough asked: does anyone want to share info on the hardware setup of their media centre? Petestrash suggested that the conversation occur over here in the forum, so I'll kick things off.

My two old S1 TiVos are now turned off, replaced with a HD TiVo and a PC. The PC is a Dell Optiplex 745 with 2G RAM and 2T disk, of which I use 500G for TV recordings. I have an NVIDIA Geforce GT220 so I can get VDPAU. The tuner card is a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4 (rev 2) card, which is now working well. Finally, I have a flirc remote receiver (see www.flirc.tv) so I can control the box with one of the spare TiVo remotes.

The software is Mythbuntu 12.04 which I try to keep reasonably up to date. I'm using Shepard to get the guide data, with OzTiVo as the preferential place for data.

Overall it was a pain to get set up, especially the proprietary blobs for the GT220 and the DViCO card, and I still have to have the tuning changed on one channel (SBS) here in SE Qld for it to work properly. However, the box has been in for about 2 years now and over the past year it has been working fine.

I have a Raspberry Pi running Raspbmc in a second room, browsing the Samba shares off the Mythbuntu PC, so I can watch the TV recordings in the second room.

Hope that's a reasonable summary!

[curto]

Over in the oztivo mailing list, Peter Gough asked: does anyone want to share info on the hardware setup of their media centre? Petestrash suggested that the conversation occur over here in the forum, so I'll kick things off.

My two old S1 TiVos are now turned off, replaced with a HD TiVo and a PC. The PC is a Dell Optiplex 745 with 2G RAM and 2T disk, of which I use 500G for TV recordings. I have an NVIDIA Geforce GT220 so I can get VDPAU. The tuner card is a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4 (rev 2) card, which is now working well. Finally, I have a flirc remote receiver (see www.flirc.tv) so I can control the box with one of the spare TiVo remotes.

The software is Mythbuntu 12.04 which I try to keep reasonably up to date. I'm using Shepard to get the guide data, with OzTiVo as the preferential place for data.

Overall it was a pain to get set up, especially the proprietary blobs for the GT220 and the DViCO card, and I still have to have the tuning changed on one channel (SBS) here in SE Qld for it to work properly. However, the box has been in for about 2 years now and over the past year it has been working fine.

I have a Raspberry Pi running Raspbmc in a second room, browsing the Samba shares off the Mythbuntu PC, so I can watch the TV recordings in the second room.

Hope that's a reasonable summary!


Initially i had two Series 1 Tivos but was unhappy with them locking up and getting content off them was always hit and miss. So i initially deployed a MythTV setup - based on Fedora - lots of hard work as i had not worked on anything other than Solaris and AIX before. The biggest issues were in getting remote control and IR blasting happening correctly. Being based on Fedora it was always a moving target as this is essentially a development environment and is rapidly superseded and no longer supported.

One of the good things i learnt from here was about LVM and Linux software RAID - which i have maintained as my base storage infrastructure at home ever since.

Fast Forward a couple of years - i now have 3 x MediaPortal systems running - one is a dedicated TV recording backend with a QUAD port PCIe DVB-T tuner (recently retired my Foxtel recording on a PVR-150) under Windows 7 running on a HP MicroServer (AMD chipset similar to an Intel ATOM), i then have a small Zotac ZBOX running on AMD Fusion and an noname Intel ATOM setup - both of these are running SSDs that i retired from my main PCs as i outgrew them and both are running on Windows 7.

All of my storage is handled under Centos on a couple of HP MicroServers running Linux MDADM and LVM - pushed out to the Mediaportal clients with SMB shares.

I also have a number of Squeezebox players around the house that access the audio stored here.

I use Sickbeard, SabNZBD and Couchpotato for sourcing the majority of my content - although with recent changes to usenet indexers i have reverted back to some torrent downloads using Transmission on the Centos hosts also

Craig

[MossNd]

Hi Craig,

Could we chat off list? I'm at nathan.moss@gmail.com

Thanks,

Nathan