Tim's nerdy hobby

Christy and I haven't had a DVR the whole time that we've lived in Connecticut. We saw the benefit of one, but we didn't like the idea of a monthly fee to use it. After all, we could buy a VCR or a DVD recorder, but that didn't seem reasonable considering that the technology exists and it would be much more practical to record on a hard drive. It's disappointing that 15 years ago if you wanted a VCR there were lots of different brands and types to choose from, but today if you want to record TV to a hard drive the only options are to rent a box from the cable/satellite company, TIVO, MOXI, or built one yourself. I opted for the latter.

I had read about Mythtv a few years ago, but I didn't have a practical way to implement it. Ideally I'd hook a computer up to the TV, but we only had a laptop which would be onerous to set up like that. This changed when Christy and I visited her family in North Carolina. Her Grandaddy Eddie fixes up old computers and gives them away. He was kind enough to give me an old computer to do this experiment with.

Building a DVR isn't as hard to do as it might seem. All you need are a computer, a way to get the TV signal into the computer, software, and a way to get the signal from the computer to the TV.

The computer
The computer doesn't need to be very advanced if you are willing to use Linux. Windows can work too, but Windows is bulkier than Linux, so I'd prefer Linux. The computer I'm using was built in 2003. At the time it was built it was probably pretty advanced, but computers have improved quite a bit since then. That's okay because it will still do everything that I need it to do.

Get the signal to the computer
I have been thinking about doing this for a while. A little more than a year ago, WOOT had a deal on a TV tuner. So I bought a cheap one there.

Software
Because of its open-source nature, there are hundreds of varieties of Linux. I played around with a few and even a few non-Linux free OS's like OpenSolaris and Haiku. Virtualbox is very handy for trying out a new OS. Ultimately, I decided on Lubuntu. Lubuntu is a lightweight derivative of Ubuntu (or possibly Ubuntu that has been customized by a guy named Lou). The advantages of this OS are that because it is a lightweight OS it doesn't install a bunch of other things that I won't need or want it to do and because it is a Ubuntu derivative it will receive regular updates and be compatible with most Linux software.
The DVR program I chose is Mythtv. There are other DVR programs for Linux, but Mythtv is the most supported and developed for Linux and I liked Mythtv's format the most.

Get the signal from the computer to the TV
This is the easiest step. Pretty much every computer has an audio out and a monitor out, so all you need are a few cables which aren't very expensive. The particular computer has a slot for a DVI monitor, which can easily be converted to an HDMI signal for HD quality video.

In the future I intend to add other software and functionality that I have wanted to use on my TV like Skype and Hulu. At this point adding more hard drive capacity, integrating our DVD collection, or adding another TV tuner to record more shows at once are much easier than if I had gone the conventional route and just rented a DVR from Comcast.