Building a PVR .

[pfbmgd]

What components do I need to build my own PVR ? Please be specific as I`m not familiar with what components I need .I want to record TV shows off cable .

I also want to back up DVDs .

I will probably run Media XP that I already have .

[rilhouse]

pc+mpeg encoder card. the pvr-150 or 250 are good encoder cards.

[jollyeskimo]

Basically a TV tuner with hardware MPEG2 encoding would be the bare minimum, if you need PIP capability, the ability to record more than one channel, or the ability to record one channel while watching another, then you'll need to look at either a dual tuner or getting two tuners.

Decent processor, more hard drive space, remote controls, and all that stuff are nice to have, but not essential.

[hardcoredummy]

MythTV is fantastic (software)... but unfortunately it's Linux.
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures

[pfbmgd]

Basically a TV tuner with hardware MPEG2 encoding would be the bare minimum, if you need PIP capability, the ability to record more than one channel, or the ability to record one channel while watching another, then you'll need to look at either a dual tuner or getting two tuners.

Decent processor, more hard drive space, remote controls, and all that stuff are nice to have, but not essential.


What is the minimum processor that I need ?

[rilhouse]

since the card will do the encoding you don't need a fast CPU. i would get a AMD Sempron 2500+

[jollyeskimo]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/faq.mspx

Microsoft says 2.4ghz, but you don't really need that much. I used a 2.0ghz with my old setup and it ran just fine. Heck, if you're not using MCE you can probably even get away with lower requirements, since it has some videocard related requirements for the transparency effects as well. With my old BeyondTV setup I ran perfectly fine with a 0.85ghz processor.

If you're using another frontend that supports software encoding of videos to save on size, then cpu will matter more. But since MCE doesn't do any transcoding/encoding unless it's to portable devices, you're probably safe with a budget cpu like rilhouse mentioned.

[mp328]

i built mine from spare parts i had laying around.
it's running on a P4 1.7Ghz which is actually slower then my athlon 1800+ by a big margin. and the thing runs amazing :D

im using sageTV v2.1 with the sageMCE customization.
and a 250 and a 150 Hauppauge tuner card.
1x200GB for recordings
2x250GB for downloaded stuff (movies, mp3's,pics)

unless u wanna make a home theatre system where u can play new games on ur big screen tv. u do not need a powerfull cpu. the hauppauge cards are all hardware encoded so no big cpu use there.