The nature of TiVo

[mnorman]

Firstly apologies if this topic has already been discussed. Feel welcome to point me to a relevant thread if it has.

I can see huge benefits to the TiVo, and don't get me wrong for wondering this ... but it does occur to me for the amount of effort that has gone into Australianising this service, how much more difficult would it be to take a ground up approach with any of the open source linux based htpc projects to achieve the same result.

Would this be a viable way of escaping the inherent limitations of trying to backdoor a closed/proprietry system like the TiVo 2. Pardon my ignorance if I'm overlooking something really stupid, this is pretty new to me so far.

As I dig more into the TiVo this question may answer itself. One thing I am still curious about is the nature of the box itself. It appears to be running some form of unix (linux?, distribution?). How different is the box itself to a PC in architecture?

[thomson]

how much more difficult would it be to take a ground up approach with any of the open source linux based htpc projects to achieve the same result.

The problem with a ground up approach is with both cost and noise. To build a quiet PC is actually pretty hard... you either end up spending a lot on a quiet case, or go through a lot of trouble with low speed fans, throttled CPU's, etc. Then you need to get a component with both a MPEG encoder and decoder chipset... the cost of which alone would equal that of a TiVo... then there are little things like power consumption...

The TiVo is a purpose built hardware platform that was designed from the ground up to be both cost effective and quiet (and yes it does run on a Linux kernel)... even with the price of PC components today, you can probably expect to shell out >$2k to build a comparable system... and you are unlikely to ever be happy with it.

Please don't let me put you off... if you have the time and money then it is a worthwhile project and you will learn a lot... but it is pretty much one of those 80/20 projects... you will be able to get 80% of what you want going pretty simply, but then get stuck on the final 20%.

[DavidH]

The TiVo is a purpose built hardware platform that was designed from the ground up to be both cost effective and quiet (and yes it does run on a Linux kernel)... even with the price of PC components today, you can probably expect to shell out >$2k to build a comparable system... and you are unlikely to ever be happy with it.

Please don't let me put you off... if you have the time and money then it is a worthwhile project and you will learn a lot... but it is pretty much one of those 80/20 projects... you will be able to get 80% of what you want going pretty simply, but then get stuck on the final 20%.

Couldn't agree more. I priced building a PVR from off the shelf components and it was actually over $2K easily (and that was with some pretty cheap parts!). Add to that that any PVR will not have full TiVo functionality etc and would not be supported in any way (apart from the local PC repair shop for hardware issues) it became a no-brainer. While TiVo has no formal support in OZ (darren's hardware fixes aside), the mere existence of this forum and the members working together largely negates this downside