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Home / DigitalVideoRecorders / DTV Recorders, Replay, TiVo, Etc... Worth the price? A better way? Are TiVo's worth their cost?

Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) Avatar If you buy a TiVo for $399 and a lifetime sub. for $199, you're dropping $600 on a piece of equipment worth how much? Consider this: Medium Power CPU (K6-2 or Celeron), Motherboard, Case and Power Supply - $200 64MB stick of PC100 - $50 ATI All-In-Wonder 128 - $150 30 GB HD - $150 Sound Card - $50 Same price here, all that's required is some creative software design. All those prices are rounded up. Check PriceWatch. It'd be possible to do that for maybe up to $100 less. Plus you could stick a NIC in it and do web surfing and e-mail on the TV (add $25 or so for a wireless keyboard). Or even better be able to copy and play your recorded MPGs to and from the machine to other computers. 06-09-2000 22:37:37

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) your point is? You can make it do what you want, who cares if it costs more than a tivo. Besides you don't have to wait a year to get V2.0 of the software where they only add features that the big networks allow. I saw a ATI "TV Wonder" card at the store for around $100, does mpeg-1, if you already have a video card that is good, then this would be the way to go. The "all in wonder" has a video card on it and costs about $240. Software would be upgraded by everyone who can program and has one. People would be coming out with new routines on a daily basis and posting them so people could use them. It would be a cool thing to see. 06-09-2000 23:26:19

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) Avatar Yeah, that's what I'm saying... Perhaps, a set-top Linux distro is in order. 06-10-2000 10:43:10

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) Evil The hardware exists. The software wouldn't be brain surgery. The *other* component you need to get the full features of TiVo is a source for directory listings. I could see the person or group that first hacks this out for Linux making a definition for a "Program Listing Format" that subsequent efforts could conform to and MAYBE your local cable company will start providing these listings (maybe via XML) on their web site so your homebrew or TiVo 2001 can get the info it needs. TiVo may lose the subscription money, but they'll still have a damn big market with all the consumers that don't want to slap their own box together. 06-22-2000 17:00:47

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) notice This is notice to all television production companies and broadcasters: If you want people with PVR's to watch your show, you need to put up a XML compatable web page that has all your program listings available. You may also choose to post them to a newsgroup to save bandwidth (in XML also). Please do not listen to those who make money from your listings, they will hold back the future and technology just to make a buck. They suck like the RIAA sucks. Thank you for not fighting the future of TV. 06-23-2000 10:33:58

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) HackitMan Well your system doesn't have all the features of a TiVo or the ease of use of a Tivo. Problems I see with your setup. (Although I don't think it is a bad idea to try to do with a PC) 1) ATI card cant capture a stream and play one back at the same time. 2) Remote control. You need to have some type of remote control interface. Since most people would want to hook the PC up to their TV. 3) Disk space. TiVo's MPEG compression/decompression chip does a great job of maximizing TV viewing space on the hard drive. 4) Adding in the $200 is a tad unfair also since you are going to need some source to get the TV listings from. Don't get me wrong it would be a fun idea. What would be really cool would be if someone backward engineered the actual TiVo hardware. Then we could have a $299 device (14 hour model is fine for hacking) that we could write our own software for. Get rid of the whole TiVo software and start from scratch. Opensource it, and away we go. The only people mad would be the TiVo people themselves since they lose their service fees. 06-23-2000 22:59:37

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) b0gh0s Profile I am interested in taking this up. I had an idea for building a digital VCR not too concerned with streaming TV like the TiVos but just recording my favorite shows, sports events, or movies in MPEG format on an IP addressable machine (with stuff like SMB and NFS running so I can view on PC or TV). The kind folk at Slashdot pointed me to a wonderfull case maker www.gtweb.com that has a great black 2U case that makes a good 'appliance' case. I bought one to build an MP3 server and they work great and are <relatively> quite. The ATI All In Wonder seems to work well in Windoz for recording stuff in MPEG format. I was playing with it and hooked up my regular cable connection to it, it seems to record MPEG fine. A non X linux machine built into a nice black 2U case that can record and be scheduled to record is quite interesting as an IP addressable VCR replacement. I thought that a Web interface ala the MP3Master idea written by Marc Heerdink (gimli.myweb.nl) for a music server might be appropriate. The idea would be to schedule and control the digital VCR via a web page from my hacked IOpener in the livingroom or any other web client in the house. Sounds like a standard linux build in a box with a decent soundcard and the ATI card that records via the coax cable connection in and plays back via S/Video to the TV (gawd I love my TV!) provided that the TV has S/Video in, would only require some web activated scripts to start and stop the recording. Maybe scheduling can be as simple as cron/at scripts? Problems I can see immediately include keeping the clock in sync with the TV/Cable companies time for accurate recording. Does this really become an issue tho if it is being treated like an old VCR but has a net connection and is web controlled? Thoughts/Suggestions/Been Done Already/Flames? 10-03-2000 20:19:49

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) redwood Profile sounds interesting... I thought of this, then I bought a replayTV and a Tivo... now, I will never go without them... useing a pc solution would be fine, there are even some good url's in the faq to find programs that _may do this... I kinda run out of time.... 10-04-2000 20:09:31

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) ozmister Profile why dont you all just get the new all-in-wonder pro card!! has basically all the same features as a tivo freeze tv record show programming guide does mpeg1 and mpeg2 etc,,,,, 10-06-2000 15:49:38

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) lkaos Profile There is already a project to bring the functionality of the ATI card line to linux. It is tightly integrated with X so X is required but it can output the whole screen in various resolutions. The only problem with using this as a TV clone is because although ATI has released alot of info about the card, they have yet to release the specs on the hardware MPEG motion encoder which is necessary unless you want to put a dual pentium III in there... http://www.linuxvideo.org/gatos 11-23-2000 12:13:10

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) vladgur Profile Linux shminux...Think of the amount of man-hours you will put into this and get a job and TIVO. I dont own TIVO yet, because I havent experienced it yet and thus addiction-free, but building a convinient appliance on the base of a off-the shelf components will costs you a bundle. That case on gtweb.net costs $250 just $40 short of the price of new tivo. If you guys want to do something with your skills and time, go to a pet shelter and volunteer 03-21-2001 18:21:16

An almost working solution (modified 0 times) draghkar Profile About six months ago I bought a ATI TVwonder VE card. It's just a basic TV tuner card for about $50. About a month ago I downloaded an update to their software that let you schedule TV shows and record them in mpeg or avi format. The software is better than most, but still needs some work. It will let you compress video using a dixv codex which will give you 10x better compression than MPEG-2, but leaves the audio uncompressed. This means you can get a decent quality for about 600MB/hour. The problem is that 1/2 that is audio. I did however solve the problem of schedualing recordings easily. I wrote a program that downloads the entire TV listings every night in html format from www.gist.com. It then reformats it so it looks a little better (no ads too) and replaces all the links with a link to a script on my computer that will add the correct show to the recorder. I don't really like ATI's software, so I'm currently writting my own that will combine the TV schedual, capturing and compressing all to one app. It's possible to write it so you can watch a show that your recording half way through the recording like a TiVo, but it might cause recording problems on slower computers. Due to limitations on the TV Tuner card I will never be able to watch one thing and record another. It might be possible on other cards or with two cards, but not with mine. I'm also going to buy an infered interface for my computer so I can use a remote control with it. One from www.evation.com/irman/ only cost $35 and works with almost any remote and any program. If I do complete this system, I should be able to record about 250 hours of DVD quality TV on my 100GB hard drive. Pretty good when you consider I only spent $85 to make my computer do this. 01-29-2002 13:22:19

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) keggers Profile Hey I would be interested in that software you wrote for the tv listings, I too have an ATI card and would love to able to schedule easily. Can you email it to me at mssmison@hotmail.com Thanks 02-14-2002 12:13:23

RE:Worth the price? A better way? (modified 0 times) pfrechette Profile There is some very useful info on http://www.iwantptv.com/. The author describes a system he built. 03-12-2002 06:09:55

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