Building a PVR for the first time. Tips?

[arrggg]

Right now I only have analog cable, and I'm not planning to upgrade anytime soon.

I'm looking at getting a Hauppauge PVR 500 for my capture card.
Not sure weather to get the 'kit' that would come with a remote as well..

Is there a better remote kit I should get? or is there a IR kit/case combo?
or are there any good cases that I should be looking at.

I'm thinking I should have about 1GB of RAM (is this too little, or too much?)
but what speed of processor do I need?

and most importantly: What were your pitfalls? I want to learn from your mistakes!

[elite]

Right now I only have analog cable, and I'm not planning to upgrade anytime soon.

I'm looking at getting a Hauppauge PVR 500 for my capture card.
Not sure weather to get the 'kit' that would come with a remote as well..

I've been very happy with the Hauppauge remote that came with my 350

If you will need to control your STB (Set Top Box) you will also need an IR Blaster

Is there a better remote kit I should get? or is there a IR kit/case combo?
or are there any good cases that I should be looking at.

You might want to take a look at the cases by Tranquil (click the banner at the top right of the page), I beleive sub (the developer of GBPVR) uses these

I'm thinking I should have about 1GB of RAM (is this too little, or too much?)
but what speed of processor do I need?

You can never have too much RAM - but 1GB should be good
A minimum of 1Ghz processor is required, however faster is always better, especially if you plan on doing any transcoding etc

and most importantly: What were your pitfalls? I want to learn from your mistakes!

None - it all works great - I would advise that you get as much disk space as possible as the recordings soon mount up

Good luck

[-stattik-]

Make sure the OS is stable with all the hardware drivers before installing GBPVR. It's always good to have a solid base before putting the apps on and troubleshooting is easier.

Good luck.

[mbox]

I recommend getting something that's at least 3GHZ.

I have a 2.6GHZ and when displaying certain things like volume osd and the sports ticker, my video becomes jittery. I think having more speed would fix this problem.

I also recommend the ATI X series video card.

I have the ATI X1300 and its awesome. Picture quality is better than my regular TV, of course I'm using straight VGA to VGA at 800x600 to an RCA Proscan TV. I'm using this with the Nvideo Decoder.

[Ted the Penguin]

let me just tell you what I am using and how it works for me

ASUS T2P case/mobo: free (used it as my main pc then it was sitting around)
[INDENT]It is nice and small, quiet. only one HDD slot, pain to put another HDD in extra 5" bay. only one PCI slot, so much for adding more tuners.[/INDENT]
Pentium 4 1.8GHz: free (from a friend)
[INDENT]Yeah, I reccomend a beefier processor, but it works pretty well, some video problems/stuttering if a recording starts or whatever[/INDENT]
Nvidia Geforce 5200FX: free (from the same friend)
[INDENT]DONT USE IT, old Nvidia cards SUCK, you can not use VMR9 with them, there is tearing, you will have to use overlay, BAD. but you can use old ATI cards, I think 9550 and up support hardware decoding, and they are also much better at supporting output to a SDTV, since you can click "video mode" and magically have 1:1 pixel mapping[/INDENT]
40GB Western Digital 7200RPM HDD: free (found in the trash room, no joke)
[INDENT]wish I had more but seems to be sufficent to get me started.[/INDENT]
512MB Corsair ValuRAM: had to buy it
[INDENT]see above[/INDENT]
Hauppauge winTV pvr 150: had to buy it
[INDENT]I am using the remote that came with this, and it works great. my only problem is the fact that I cant wake the machine with the remote, I have to do it manually. this can be fixed if you use one that comes with the MCE remote (I think the kit comes with that) AND your motherboard supports wake one USB, that is key[/INDENT]
I have some cheap DVD drive which I also got for free from the same friend, I think its an NEC 2x reader or something, but actually thats kinda nice because it never spins up really fast (aka loud). I know nero has a program to throttle your DVD drive if you get one with a high read speed.

Overall I am really satisfied with my HTPC, and its modest build price contributes to that. I would strongly suggest getting newer components since you will be building this one new.

but scaling is the question you really need to lay out what you plan to do with gbpvr. are you going to be burning shows to a DVD? are you going to be transcoding them to store on a disk forever?
let us know what you plan to be doing with the machine to get a better idea of what to build.

my only major problem has been with that old crappy 5200fx, trying to set up the TV properly, tearing problems with VMR renderer. made it much easier to troubleshoot when i got a HDTV and could actually see what was going wrong clearly.

[arrggg]

Thank you for all your good commets

scaling is the question you really need to lay out what you plan to do with gbpvr.

Optimaly I want to record some shows on a regular basis, maybe record one, watch live TV.

Also (And here's the biggie) I have a TV in another part of the house where cable isn't run to... But wireless is, I was thinking of buying one of those MediaMVP (or the Wireless MediaMVP) so I can watch TV in there.

Also I have two kids under three... so to play Dora or Jojo "On Demand" or to copy thier DVDs onto a Harddrive (so they don't finger up or break the DVDs)

being only 2 1/2 my oldest is pretty good with a computer and a remote... so I *think* I could teach him how to start movies. (he can already start DVDs on his own)

maybe instead of a smaller box I need a server type box...

[Ted the Penguin]

personally I have never used a MediaMVP, so I have no idea what kind of requirements they have for the machine serving to them. I would imagine that they are modest and you could just use whatever machine you build to serve to them too.

There are a whole bunch of cases out there that are good for HTPC use, alot of them look like AV components, and are about the same size (think old desktops) and they have plenty of space in them for drives.

since you are planning on ripping DVDs to it I would strongly suggest a large hard drive. or even better 2 large hard drives in RAID. RAID 0 would probably be good for you, best size and speed for price. however if you want redundancy RAID 5 is a better choice. you should really notice the performance difference of raid if you are using 3 different media files at the same time (recording, watching, and serving). on that note you will probably want a multicore processor to provide the best performance, these can be had for a very decent price now (pentiumD 805 < $100 and highly overclockable if you are into that)
Also I reccomend using a separate small drive for your operating system, to provide separation from the media files, this will improve performance and reliability (as well as ease of setup)

[RattyDAVE]

Another thing is that it is going to cost you more than you thought. (eeek!)

Mine is running on a P4 1.8gig, 1gig memory, 500meg disk space.
2 x Pvr 150s
1 x pvr 500
Redrat Serial
Ati 9550

All works fantactic! And has changed the way we view TV. Gone are the days we have to plan our day around the TV. Also getting the kids to do suff now is alot easier. The pause button is a great thing.

All in all spent far too much and the system has grown to a point that it does EVERYTHING. It is now an essential item and worth the effort!

DAVE

[nitrogen_widget]

Hey Ted, I've got a g-foce fx5200 & never had a problem with it untill I re-installed XP so I could use the latest version of GBPVR.
Then I was getting almost 100% cpu usage with a 2.7ghz celeron D socket 775.

Something was definetly wrong.

Overlay was about 12% with mpeg playback.
Could not figure it out.
Then I realised I had the resolution at 800x600.
When I put it too 720x480 I was looking at about 15% cpu usage on VMR with purevideo decoder.

I guess the hardware scaling makes more of a difference than I thought.

[andrew_macaluso]

I haven't completed mine yet, but I've been planning it for months. It should have been done by now, but the mobo was bad and may have fried my processor so I had to send both back. I got the cheapest case on Newegg that didn't have bad reviews - $20 (PS included)! It looks kinda ugly, but a friend of mine is a whiz with carpentry and he's going to make a nice wooden case for it and help me stain it. Should look very nice.

The rig itself will have an AMD X2, sata 250 GB samsung hard drive, 1 gig dual-channel RAM, Hauppauge 150 (maybe - it also has the radio?), and Nvidia GeForce 6600.

I don't really know how this will work because I never built one of these before. I was going with a cheap one... but the price difference b/w this and the cheapest one I could build from new was like $200. Plus when the game Spore comes out, I can tear it up! I was kinda happy that this only cost me around $600. Not too bad, I don't think. Besides, In a few months I will probably add more RAM and HD space.