Anybody run their PC as a DVR? (digital video recorder)

I'm considering upgrades for my PC, and I've been wondering about setting it up to operate as a DVR. Best Buy sells some of the Hauppauge products for this function. I'm wondering if these products are any good, how difficult they are to set up, and how well they actually work.

We're running analog cable so things like Tivo won't work for us.

Yep. I actually have used both the Hauppauge PVR 250 and the PVR USB2. The hardware seems to work fine. I actually use Beyond TV by Snapstream instead of the software that comes with them. I've also used the PVR 250 under MythTV which is a freeware solution for Linux. MythTV really rocks - especialaly for the price, but is a real pain the rear to set up.

It would probably be helpful if we knew what your current setup looks like, how much you are willing to spend, how do you plan to use it, etc.

Here are a couple general thoughts:

- (IMO) You want to make sure you have (at least) a HDD that you can dedicate to this purpose.
- The HDD should be on it's own controller.
- You want to have a card that does MPEG2 encoding (like the two listed above).

A lot of this depends on how you are going to use it. For example, do you plan to use the PC while it is recording? Do you plan to play back on the PC? Do you plan to play back on the PC while it is recording? How many shows do you want to be able to record at once? Do you want to play back from another computer? Do you want to play back to a TV? What is your level of computer experience? What is your level of patience? Etc.

-john


p.s. There is a good forum just for this: AVSForum.com

I don't know how helpful this is but I know a guy who is setting it up now. Talk about dedicating HDD's; he just bought 4 500GB drives that he set up in a raid configuration. The redundancy uses up a drive (or a quarter of the space anyway) so he has 1.5 Terabytes of disk space.

He is running it on a linux box. If you would like me to find out the details I will. He loves talking about it.

Thanks for the info. John.

Maybe I'm working on incompatible goals. I'm running an AMG 1.6G processor, 1MB memory, 20G hard drive, 98SE.

I was about to upgrade the hard drives and upgrade to XP. Then I see 300G hard drives cheap and start thinking "what if". One option would be to put in new drives for the OS and data, and add a 300G drive for video storage and the WinTV card.

Ideally I would like to have a dual tuner card to record 2 programs at one time, or record one and watch another, and do the pause/rewind thing during replay. AND surf the net at the same time. Maybe this would work smoothly, maybe not. The wiring alone might be too much of a problem. Or the cost might be a problem, after all if I was spending megabucks I could just try to make Tivo work.

Maybe just build a dedicated PC to set next to the television and act as my own programmable Tivo, but then that would get to be fairly expensive too.

Running a Hauppauge PVR-150 with Win XP PRO. Very easy to setup. I ended up getting it for $70 on sale at Circuit City.

I found that in my situation simply buying a DVR was the best solution. Here are some of the reasons why:

You can't really do anything with the PC while you are recording.

I had problems with the computer coming out of sleep mode and actually starting the recording process.

If the power goes off the computer will not start back up and record the shows.

Computers are noisy and suck a lot of power.

For $400 I got a Pioneer DVR that lets me record to a built in hard drive or to a disk. I can watch something recorded on the drive while recording another show. Editing out commercials is a snap, and I can save shows to disk if I want.

bjn70 said:

Thanks for the info. John.

Maybe I'm working on incompatible goals. I'm running an AMG 1.6G processor, 1MB memory, 20G hard drive, 98SE.

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Besides not having the disks space needed for video recording, I think the weakest link in that lineup is W98. I'd suggest XP for this type of use.

I was about to upgrade the hard drives and upgrade to XP. Then I see 300G hard drives cheap and start thinking "what if". One option would be to put in new drives for the OS and data, and add a 300G drive for video storage and the WinTV card.

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I think it depends on how you are going to use it. If you don't plan to do anything with the PC while recording, the 300G would probably be OK. If you plan on using the PC while recording, you could consider 2x120GB HDD instead. Note they should each be on their own dedicated controller tho.

Ideally I would like to have a dual tuner card to record 2 programs at one time, or record one and watch another, and do the pause/rewind thing during replay. AND surf the net at the same time. Maybe this would work smoothly, maybe not.

Click to expand...

It can, but you are going to need to design your system for it. My inclination would be to do someting like the following:

(1) 120GB HDD for your OS.
(1) 2 port SATA "RAID" controller
(2) 2xSATA 120GB HDDs (in a striped configuration)
(1) Windows XP home edition
(1) Nvidia 6600GT or better video card
(2) GB of RAM

Maybe just build a dedicated PC to set next to the television and act as my own programmable Tivo, but then that would get to be fairly expensive too.

Click to expand...

Either way could work. The main thing is to keep the disks for the video seperate from the main OS disk and to make sure you have enough RAM to keep your web browsing from interfering with your video recording.

-john

Ras_Thavas said:

I found that in my situation simply buying a DVR was the best solution. Here are some of the reasons why:

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While I agree that purchasing a DVR may be the best solution for some (many?), and the problems you indicate are real, they are not unsolvable.

You can't really do anything with the PC while you are recording.

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Careful configuration can prevent this problem. I routinely record TV, watch a video stream, run virtual machines and surf the web concurrently. BUT... my configuration is carefully selected and what some might consider hefty.

I had problems with the computer coming out of sleep mode and actually starting the recording process.

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Sorry, I don't sleep my machine, so not sure about this.

If the power goes off the computer will not start back up and record the shows.

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Most BIOSes will have a setting to indicate if they should restart. However, a UPS is probably a better solution.

Computers are noisy

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Can be. Don't have to be. Good case selection and cooling selection can do a lot to tame this issue.

and suck a lot of power.

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I suppose this is true.

For $400 I got a Pioneer DVR that lets me record to a built in hard drive or to a disk. I can watch something recorded on the drive while recording another show. Editing out commercials is a snap, and I can save shows to disk if I want.

Click to expand...

I agree this is a reasonable solution for a lot of folks.

-john

Ras_Thavas said:

You can't really do anything with the PC while you are recording.

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Hauppauge PVR based cards are hardware decoders any don't rely on processor power very much. I use my PC just as much when recording or not.

A lot of people here have already given you good advice.
Now my current system was an experiment and is pretty beefy even by current standards.

AMD Athlon 64 x2 (dual core) processor +4600
2GB RAM
200 GB main drive (small system partition and larger "data" partition)
200 GB "Backup" drive
400 GB RAID (2x200GB SATA drives)

ATI All-in-Wonder x800
ATI TV-Wonder (I had sitting around gathering dust forever)

Using Beyond TV 4 running under Windows XP Pro.

Now neither of my capture cards have on-chip compression so the processor has to handle it, but the processor is such a monster it really doesn't make a difference.

I can actually record two different shows and play command & conquer at the same time with out any hiccups. One oddity I've run into is that if Beyond TV is running and I try to do a large file transfer over the network it will fail about midway (it's like the network keeps re-setting itself).

So I guess I'm saying if you have a brute of a machine it won't matter. If you have a weaker machine you should make sure the capture card(s) you get will do the encoding on-chip to prevent overloading the system.

Hauppauge PVR based cards are hardware decoders any don't rely on processor power very much. I use my PC just as much when recording or not.

Click to expand...

You still need to write that data to your hard drive. I suspect whatever you are doing does not require much read/write activity from your drive.

My PC has a raid 0 array for the OS, and I was writing TV data to another drive on a different channel. I can not do more than surf the web without causing frame rate drops on the recorded material, at least while recording in DVD quality.

I'm using windows media center to record shows and it works great. It's very easy to view the guide and schedule recordings.

I can do anything I want on the computer while it records and things are stable. That includes ripping /encoding CDs, decrypting DVDs, running Autocad, publisher, etc.

I've got 2 gigs of ram, a dual core P-4 and a Terabyte of internal space (but I'm going to switch to just using a 500 gig external for recorded TV files).

Ras_Thavas said:

My PC has a raid 0 array for the OS, and I was writing TV data to another drive on a different channel. I can not do more than surf the web without causing frame rate drops on the recorded material, at least while recording in DVD quality.

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It's hard to say where things are going wrong w/o knowing more, but for starters I would run the performance meter and see if you are runing out of CPU or memory. A lot of machines have a high CPU load without even doing anything because of random junk.

For example, after upgrading my system to an AMD64 X2 3800+ with a freshly installed copy of Windows XP, I all of a sudden noticed an idle load of about 30%?! Just a half hour before the idle load was near zero. Taking a look with the peformance meter and a Google latter and it turns out that the Bluetooth adapter I added was the source of the problem. Needless to say, I decided I didn't need Bluetooth that bad. And this is on a freshly loaded system without the oppertunity to gather a lot of cruft.

Back to your issue -- it is also possible the problem is with the disk setup, but I think we would need very detailed information on how things are set up and what you were doing to have a chance of fingering the problem.

-john

tiktok 22 said:

Hauppauge PVR based cards are hardware decoders any don't rely on processor power very much. I use my PC just as much when recording or not.

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Key here is Haupauge + "PVR". Basically in Hauppauge speak, "PVR" means the product has a build in MPEG encoder.

Having a built in MPEG encoder is highly desirable because it takes the data, encodes it into an MPEG stream right on the card so it is much smaller when it gets pased around the system, written to disk, etc.

-john

zespectre said:

One oddity I've run into is that if Beyond TV is running and I try to do a large file transfer over the network it will fail about midway (it's like the network keeps re-setting itself).

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To something on your LAN? One thing I've noticed is things have a bit of a hard time sometimes when one side of the connection is running at a different speed. For example, you are transfering from a machine with GE to a machine with 100Mb ethernet (or 10Mb ethernet) via a switch.

If you have a weaker machine you should make sure the capture card(s) you get will do the encoding on-chip to prevent overloading the system.

Click to expand...

Getting a card with hardware MPEG encoding is a good idea regardless IMO.

-john