I've had enough with Comcast. Our rates are outrageous. I have decided to drop cable completely and build a PVR. I am building from scratch and have no spare parts. I am hoping to do this as cheap as possible. However I don't want to spend too little and get something that has bad picture or is jittery. I am hoping to have two ATSC tuners to record whatever I can get over the air. I will watch that plus I am planning on streaming from netflix and sites like hulu. I plan on keeping comcast internet and will probably have a hard wired connection to the router.

So how much CPU and motherboard do I need. I would like to be able to record on two tuners (I could drop to one tuner) and watch recorded content at the same time. I had picked out the cheapest one at newegg with an HDMI out but the I read that the radeon 3200 video is bad and I should go with nvidia 9400 or at least 8200.

How about:

$60 motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6813135085

$57 athalon chip
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6819103211

Case with 270w power supply for $59
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6811121068

500 GB hard drive for $55
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6822152052

4gb ram
any rec's

OS
I can get pretty much whatever thru my wife's school for free. Should I get Vista MCE?

I know on top of this I need two tuners. I'm confused as to why some tuners cost $20 after rebate and some cost $120. I read that with ATSC they should all have the same quality. Do I need one with a remote so that I can have a remote sensor.

What about a remote. I have a harmony 520 that I would like to use if possible. I would need something to control playback and enable FF/RW etc.

Thanks

I am having trouble and have been scratching my head for a while trying to figure this out. I have a hard drive installed in my NMT and I want to be able to play them through GBPVR so I have a single interface for my wife. Here's my issue:

Currently I'm able to see all of my DVDs but I'm not able to play the ones that I didn't convert to .mp4. DVDs that I backed up to the NMT hard drive so that I could play them with a menu, when I select the DVD, for example [Aliens], it takes me into another window. From there, I see Aliens.dvd. When I select that, it causes the PCH to go to a window that makes it look like it's loading but then it kicks me back into GBPVR. Aliens, in this example, plays fine from the PCH menu as well as from a PC. It's just not working correctly from GBPVR. If I select a movie that I converted to .mp4, those play just fine.

Any ideas????


Woody

are there any opensource community common plugin libraries?

i know a few plugins are open source, and have a library they give out. but is there an actual detected open source library?

i was going to the media inset (i havent decided on a name yet), but was also thinking about other controls (that should be exactly the same no matter what plugin you are using) eg onscreen keyboard, digit pad etc.

also anyone have any recommendations about the best open source hosting service ?
google code (looks kinda blah though)
codeplex (im favouring this one, just because is more Csharpie i guess)
sourceforge (they do allow a website for the project, but everything else looks out dated)

they all do svn which is the biggy. oh and i was kinda hoping for a feature that would allow automatic updates, so if we publish a update dll the old one could check online and download the latest own (so each plugin isnt referencing an old dll all the time)

In another thread, I discovered a couple of features...

Quote:From whurslton

Ok, so when are you guys going to add a setting to flag repeats and not new programs so I don't have to write my own.

I would like to have:
Heroes
Heroes (Rpt)

instead of:
Heroes *
Heroes

Well, I got GBPVR 1.3.7 up and running, and I like it very much. I have a general question, plus I have had a couple of crashes that I would like to troubleshoot.

The system: MSI P6NG Neo-Digital mb, 2gb mem, Pentium dual 2.5 processor, 500gb Seagate hard drive, EVGA GeForce 8600 GT/512mb, Hauppauge PVR-500 (dual) and Angel I (dual) tuners.

1. My first DVR experience was with a Pioneer unit that I both liked and hated. It was eons better that a vcr, but the limitations and other things drove me crazy. Video quality was very good, though - even at 4 hours per 4.7gb dvd. Should I get that kind of quality with GBPVR and these tuners? I'm not, yet, but there could, of course, be other problems - cable runs, etc.

2. Last night, and once before, GBPVR crashed while recording 4 streams. The times of the recordings were: 8:00-9:30, 8:00-10:00, 8:00-9:00, 9:00-10:00. The crash apparently occurred around 9:00pm. I am attaching related logs.

Any suggestions will be very much appreciated.

JFM

I understand that playing MKV files back on the MVP is not an ideal situation and i didnt expect it to be perfect, but after much trial and error im tearing my hair out here!

I have tried a number of different ffmpeg versions and altered the transcode setting with no difference whatsoever. Whenever i transcode x264 MKV files to mpeg i end up with a choppy video. The server transcodes at nearly 2x speed so im sure it not that, and the attatched (or hosted) video file shows the problem

Any suggestions as to what might be causing this stuttering?

http://rapidshare.com/files/172552718/MV...2.mpg.html

p.s PVRX2 is the latest btw, contrary to sig below!

Regards

Stu

I bought this TellStick USB adapter (75 Euro) that controls cheap wireless power outlet on/off devices, that operates on 433.92MHz
I don't know if if the Stick is sold outside of Sweden, but the power devices are sold all over Europe under different names. I think that in UK it is these type of devices.
http://www.uk-automation.co.uk/lighting-...8_168.html

TellStick USB adapter http://www.telldus.se
SWedish device list: http://www.telldus.se/wiki/index.php?title=Mottagare

There is a .Net wrapper for the driver with a asp.net page the to control the "light switches"
I searched the web and found the Abyss web server that has support for .net2, so now I have a zip, that you just can drop and control the light from a local web page.

I have also made a EWA plugin config file so I get a DeLight tab in EWA that launches the DeLight page so I can control my lamps via EWA.

Cool to be able to control my lights via EWA.

Screenshot of the DeLight web page (skinned by me).

Wife is getting an ipod touch for Crimbo, which means I need to infect one of my computers with iTunes.
Currently my media folders are arranged with WMP11, and previously when I've (briefly) tried itunes I've ende up in a complete mess with duplicate files etc....

If I was starting from scratch I think I could deal with itunes but I've got a 60+GB music library already and I would like to keep using WMP.

Any tips for a happy marrige between media player and itunes, or do I just have 2 copies of my music library one infected with itunes the other by microsoft?

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/GuidePlus

Its a command line xml enhancer (only tried on schedules direct) that is very quick, doesn't explode when your internet connection is down and does a few basic things.

Movies - adds 3 things to the title - star rating, year released, and if its new to the guide. For example 30 days of night would look like this during the first few weeks after it hits your guide:

30 Days of Night (2.5+)(2007)(new)

For the first few weeks as it builds a history pretty much all movies made within two years will show up as new but as the history grows it will only tag movies that are new to your guide history as new.

Series - adds a * to the title if its new, moves A, An and The to the back. Does a tvRage lookup on specified series to get the season and episode number which it prepends to the subtitle. So The Sons of Anarchy would look like this:
Title- Sons of Anarchy, The*
Subtitle- s1e4. Jaxson five

YMMV - I wrote it because the enhancer I used kept freezing in the middle of the night and actually taking my machine down, plus I wanted the new movie function. Don't expect a whole bunch of support or extra features but its been running great for me for 2 weeks now so I thought I would let it into the wild. Note that you have to create a seed showDetail.txt file to get the series episode # working.

Just noticed a slight oddity in use.

With mouse on PC (remote, unable to check server at this moment)
Bring up recordings,
click on 'ready',
click on an item on the right,
try to scroll up and down the list with the mouse and what happens is it scrolls the options on the left.

Hmmm. Just checked a few more and they are the same.
Double click on right hand item in ready to get the list of episodes and scroll wheel also moves up and down the left list.

Also does the same with 'new'.

So it looks like the scroll wheel is stuck in the left hand menu.


edit: does it on the server as well.