The AusGamers DVR Project
Post by Nathan @ 03:56pm 19/01/10 | Comments
AusGamers shows you how to turn your HTPC into an awesome Linux-powered Digital Video Recorder. Never miss a show again!
In my previous article I assembled 1080p capable HTPC hardware for just $500: an Asrock ION330, 1GB of memory, 160GB HDD and the Hauppage MCE remote. On the software side, I walked through installing Ubuntu and XBMC for a completely free solution to playing HD video and surround sound using the Asrock's HDMI output.
In this second article, I will discuss the hardware you need to purchase and the software setup required to enable Digital Video Recording (DVR) functionality on your HTPC.
What is a DVR?
During the last decade all Australian free-to-air television stations began broadcasting in digital using the DVB-T format, which specifies a video codec of MPEG2 and an audio codec of MP3 or AC3 (Dolby Surround Sound). In other words, its pretty similar to broadcasting DVD-quality over the air.A DVR then, is the modern day VCR – recording the broadcast video and audio in digital DVD-quality format that you can then playback at a later time. But unlike the old VCR, the computer-based DVR offers a variety of helpful features including the ability to schedule recordings of all episodes in a series.
Is recording TV legal?
We are all so familiar with the VCR concept that perhaps you have never even stopped to consider whether it is actually legal to record television shows. The short answer is yes, it is legal to record a television show for your own personal use so that you may watch the show at a more convenient time (known as “time-shifting”) – the Australian Copyright Council has a Q&A addressing the issue in more detail.What I think is perhaps more interesting though is that, the legislation that explicitly allowed time-shifting was not passed in Australia until 1 January 2006. When you consider that VCR's were introduced in the late 1970's and generally had no other purpose than time-shifting there was clearly a long-term gap between government legislation and community attitudes on time-shifting.
Before we get started: learn the lingo
There are a few terms that you will encounter while setting up your DVR, which I have gathered here:- Multiplex: This is basically what we think of as a “television network”. There are five multiplexes available in Australia for most people - ABC, SBS, 7, 9, 10 (or their regional equivalents).
- Service: Each multiplex contains one or more services, which is what we consider to be a channel. For example, the Nine network's multiplex has 3 services: 9, 9HD, and Go.
- Tuning: A DVB-T tuner device can tune into only one multiplex at a time, but can record from multiple services on the same multiplex simultaneously.
This means a single tuner could record Channel 9 and Channel GO at the same time, but could not record from Channel 9 and Channel 10 simultaneously. To do that, you will require multiple TV tuners.
On to page 2 - what do you need?
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Posted 01:03pm 20/1/10
Posted 02:44pm 20/1/10
lol digg link --->
last edited by thermite at 14:00:32 20/Jan/10
last edited by trog at 14:44:57 20/Jan/10
Posted 01:42pm 20/1/10
Posted 02:01pm 20/1/10
It seems like a bug that I was able to access that control panel. It only appears on qgl.ausforums.com not ausgamers.com
Posted 02:58pm 20/1/10
Posted 03:17pm 20/1/10
Posted 03:43pm 20/1/10
I've got no regrets going with Win 7 Media Center however after seeing your setup I think future builds will use XBMC
Posted 04:14pm 20/1/10
Posted 04:29pm 20/1/10
XBMC is cool but no FTA support, yeah? I don't watch much FTA but for cricket and other sport it's a must, and annoying have to switch apps.
Posted 05:04pm 20/1/10
Posted 05:53pm 20/1/10
Dude what do you think the write-up in this thread was for?
Posted 05:58pm 20/1/10
Also, can you program the box to record TV at designated times?
Posted 05:58pm 20/1/10
Yeah, I know. Just saying what I got, s'all good Denny! Comprehension was one of my strongest suites in Grade 4.
Posted 06:27pm 20/1/10
The TV guide works straight away, drivers just download and work for pretty much everything and add in something like media browser (Its a plugin for Windows media centre 7) and all your media just works, with cover art and everything.
This is one place were linux just doesnt have it done properly yet.
Posted 06:50pm 20/1/10
I know I said this in the last article comments - but Is it? Or do you just already know how to set up Windows?
The process covered in my article can be completed in 10 minutes; I have simply gone into a lot of detail because I realize Linux is completely unknown to most people and they will not know how to get started.
XBMC's functionality is far nicer than Media Centre + Media browser if you have a large collection, and its prettier to boot. There's a bunch of modding and skinning stuff that's fun to tinker with too. Media Center is really in the middle of the spectrum, its not awesome at anything but it covers a broad selection of things reasonably well.
XBMC is definitely weaker than Media Center in TV functionality right now, not being able to schedule a recording from within the XBMC interface is a bit lame. Of course, you dont have to run XBMC on Linux since it also runs on Windows, but since the focus of the first article was on building a new PC to run XBMC on, it seemed stupid to spend $100+ on Windows when you will just have XBMC running fullscreen 24/7
Posted 08:42pm 20/1/10
Posted 09:10pm 20/1/10
I also found this iPhone app that lets you use your iphone as a touchpad or keyboard over wifi so I don't need to have a keyboard mouse. Works well in conjunction with my MCE remote thingie.
last edited by Syco at 21:10:51 20/Jan/10
Posted 10:11pm 20/1/10
Posted 10:31pm 20/1/10
I used xbmc for years on an original xbox and upgraded to xbmc x86 on a PC and windows 7 is a serious step up for tv on a pc and usability in everything. The only reasons you would use a linux mce (or xbmc on windows) over w7mce is because,
- Budget (stingy)
- Wanna watch all your downloaded movies without extracting rars (pirating)
- Expandability (not many addons are actually that useful, it's mostly just pretty factor because default xbmc and mythtv look like arse)
- Wanna play around to see what else is out there before going back to w7mce
Where as the reasons to use w7mce over alternative
- Next to no config (it's literally next-next-next-waitforchannelscan-next-finish to setup a tuner)
- Next to no driver problems (good luck getting an ir remote receiver working on linux
- Turns any other w7 network pc and xbox into a tv and gives
- Easy access to recorded tv from another windows pc and xbox
- Over the air guide, now and next
- Recording shows and whole series (cuz trying to record in xbmc or mythtv suxxx)
- Intuative and quick ui
I could go on, but that has just been my experience switching from linux based to windows.
last edited by eXemplar at 22:31:53 20/Jan/10
Posted 12:02am 21/1/10
Not realy, windows 7 installs in a few clicks, its pretty much boot from the cd, click install. Once its installed, it finds drivers for everything, and I mean everything, I havent had to download a single driver for windows 7 yet, it either has it already, or find it automatically from windows update.
Then you just load Media centre, click a few buttons on the wizard, like accept, pick the tuner source and bang, its all done.
Dont get me wrong, the linux thing probably works great, and from the pics doesnt look that hard, but media centre 7 is sooo much easier. I'd like to see a follow up comparing performance/usablity to Windows 7.
Posted 12:41am 21/1/10
it was s***
all sorts of issues getting it to be able to recognise mkv, media centre is your typical windows idiot 'we know best' type thing where it just kept saying the files couldn't be found but what it really meant was 'Im too spaz to be able to play mkv even tho wmp, vlc and mpc all can just fine'
after several reboots and reinstalls of shark etc, it finally decided to work
then it failed so horribly, horribly hard by not having a built in scraper
so I installed some plugin someone here said to use, and it managed to scrape about 80 of my 300+ movies
top stuff
back to xbmc where only 9 of my 300 movies required a .nfo file for the scraper and I'm not forced to do some idiotic microsoft method of configuration where it's assumed I have no business understanging technical issues and must be spoon fed and have things hidden away from me
it f***** cracks me up when ppl say 'windows is just click click done'
I don't even use linux on my desktop, I prefer windows
but for this it's just dumb when you've experienced the goodness that is xbmc
and whoever said good luck tog etting an ir working on linux - that's just lol.
install lirc, pick your receiver and remote and you're done
Posted 03:06am 21/1/10
Posted 08:06am 21/1/10
Posted 08:20am 21/1/10
Posted 10:03am 21/1/10
Posted 10:20am 21/1/10
What I wouldn't mind seeing is a DVR sever with broadcast flag cut multi tuners and support epg walkthough which could be useful
last edited by HerbalLizard at 10:18:45 21/Jan/10
last edited by HerbalLizard at 10:20:23 21/Jan/10
Posted 10:23am 21/1/10
Me and 2 guys at work who have machines didn't.
Jim's not a tard so it obviously can have issues, but it would also seems that it can be done with no issue.
Windows 7 was insert the disk, install the drivers. Windows 7 codec pack. Finished. It took me about 2 hours. Most of that time windows was doing its install.
The home work group thing is nice for sharing.
Posted 10:29am 21/1/10
Posted 04:34pm 21/1/10
This sums it up quite nicely, from http://handbrake.fr/
Posted 07:29pm 21/1/10
Posted 07:34pm 21/1/10
Posted 07:36pm 21/1/10
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD
Posted 09:17pm 21/1/10
How did I not know this and can I get W7MC to do the same?
Also while we're at it, what plugins do you all use for media center?
Posted 12:20am 22/1/10
Linux still has a fair way to come before id think about using it as a media box, flash support is a major killer for me especially because of iview which is a real shame.
I use open source for everything else but until linux becomes more hardware friendly it stays in VMware images so i can tinker and be up to date with new distros. You dont put linux on ur pc, you buy ur pc for linux.
Posted 01:59am 22/1/10
In my case I didn't appear to need to firmware update the TV tuner. It worked immediately. I haven't noticed any issues.
As for using TVheadend vs MythTV, I'm interested to hear some expanded thoughts on the "slow channel-changing". With a MythTV backend I've noticed that my channel up/down buttons just freeze the TV playback. I just reverted to using the UI overlay which looks almost identical to the one screenshotted in this article. Still takes a few seconds to buffer the channel, but I thought it was reasonable. I'm really just wondering if it's worth my while to switch my backend to TVheadend.
My background:
I've had a HTPC/DVR set up under my TV for quite a few years now. Had been using MediaPortal under XP for most of that time. I find MediaPortal to be great once it's set up, but still a little janky. It's not perfect, but I still prefer it to Windows Media Centre. I tried the Media Centre included in Windows 7 recently and had heaps of trouble doing the simple things like browsing my media. I don't think I ever managed to get it to add my music to the library.
Anyway the HTPC article last year inspired be to dump the old, noisy full-ATX PC I had been using, buy an ION330 and try XBMC. XBMC is similar to MediaPortal in many ways (not surprising since it's a fork) except the UI incredibly sexy and you don't need to quit it to change settings. For the Windows users, if you aren't a huge channel surfer, I definitely recommend checking it out.
I still wanted live TV on this new box so I didn't actually follow the HTPC article. I used Mythbuntu rather than Ubuntu just because it already includes MythTV and lirc making the configuration a little easier. It also uses xfce instead of Gnome which would free up some resources. Not to mention all the other included software you probably aren't using if XBMC is fullscreened 24/7. By some amazing coincidence I bought the same TV tuner as recommended in this article. It was the cheapest one that I could find that appeared to have good Linux support.
Anyway thanks Nats!
Edit: Oh yeah and get the YouTube plugin for XBMC.
Posted 07:39am 22/1/10
because you dont need to
Posted 08:05am 22/1/10
I think technically its a feature that the DVR has to add, I'm not sure if Media Center has it.
Linux has had Flash support for a long, long time. I dont know of any XBMC iView plugins though.
That's certainly got some truth to it for a HTPC - the TV tuner in particular needs to be researched. The IR receiver is simple enough (Microsoft's solution has been available and supported for 5+ years now) and any Nvidia or ATI card will work OK for graphics if you dont require 1080p, otherwise you'll need to make sure your CPU is fast enough.
I also have an older AverTV Volar (no "X" - its been phased out now) which is like this, the appropriate file is already in /lib/firmware . I suppose the same will be true when Ubuntu 10.04 is released for the newer Volar X - its a bit of a shame that Ubuntu dont make new firmware files available as updates.
I should clarify, I was talking in terms of using the Myth and Tvheadend plugins within XBMC - where for Myth I would see change times of about 5 seconds, compared to 1 second for Tvheadend. The difference is very noticable. For reference, using the standard Mythfrontend I see about 3 seconds, which I'd say is bearable.
Posted 08:03am 22/1/10
Do you mean http://www.windows7codecs.com/ ?
Posted 09:52am 22/1/10
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/02/mkvs-for-minimalists-on-windows-7.html
However I used haali media splitter instead of Gabests Matroska Splitters.
Posted 10:02am 22/1/10
Posted 10:04am 22/1/10
yep i tried the hack7mc minimalist guide as well
but don't you mean 'mkv in media centre is ridiculously easy'? cos as I said, I could already play mkv's fine in windows 7 with vlc, wmp and media player classic - it was just media cantre that refused to play them until random installing, rebooting and having it eventually and suddenly work
Posted 10:12am 22/1/10
Posted 10:12am 22/1/10
And another +1 for mediabrowser plugin. It's a great interface for media and scraps the movie info and covers etc.
I found that avoiding these 'plays everything' codec packs eg. Shark007 and only installing what I needed was the best approach.
Posted 10:40am 22/1/10
Posted 11:09am 22/1/10
last edited by trog at 11:04:08 07/Jun/10
Posted 12:39am 23/1/10
Posted 03:04am 23/1/10
Posted 09:34am 23/1/10
Posted 08:41pm 22/3/10
Running it on Dell Insipiron 1720? Laptop with the 8600M card, VDAPU works a treat no issues with HD.
Running Dual Volar X Recording/watching all a breaze.
Only 1 thing of note is that if you use XBMC remote to access the video content on your phone, it dosnt list the live tv properly, works fine via just remote and use the screen.