Two days ago, I blogged about the way that TIVo had sold out its customers by adding DRM that allows broadcasters to selectively prevent the long-term storage of shows you record (despite the fact that it's perfectly legal to record shows and has been settled, Supreme-Court-led law since 1984's Betamax case). Yesterday, i blogged some alternatives to TiVo you can buy or build if you want to really own your PVR, instead of having your PVR 0wn you.
Now here's Build Your Own PVR, a site that focuses on building a high-powered, full-featured personal video recorder out of your old PC. Unlike TiVo, the box you build for yourself will be on your side — not only will it never delete a program without your permission, it can also auto-skip commercials, move video seamlessly to your other PVRs and computers, and provide you with additional useful home-server functionality, such as serving as your firewall or router.
Dug up some inside scoop on the upcoming Hauppauge Wireless MediaMVP (link goes to wired MediaMVP product page).
First: People have noted in the forum that the regular wired MediaMVP has been marked down at Radio Shack. The "wired" regular MediaMVP is not going away, as it is still useful for setups with more than 3 MediaMVP's or if you have poor wifi signal strength/extremely long distances between the "server" PC and the MediaMVP client. So there's no reason to not grab one if you want the wired network version.
Second: The wireless/wifi MediaMVP will be 802.11g.
Third: The Wireless MediaMVP will start to be available mid-October and have a MSRP of $149
Fourth: Can't wait to get my hands on one. I was considering grabbing one of the wired MediaMVP's from Radio Shack and adding a wireless game adapter (basically an ethernet to wifi adapter commonly used to get your Xbox onto a wireless network), but I can wait a month or so for an integrated solution that's been tweaked to be a wireless media extender.
For those that don't know the MediaMVP is a popular small/quiet playback client that streams your content over your network. There are 3rd party "clients" to allow you to interact/stream/watch your content from your GBPVR server or SageTV server. Some people use the MediaMVP as their primary playback device (as opposed to putting the noisey pc in the same room as the TV and using video card TV output); others use the MediaMVP to extend their existing setup to multiple/additional TV's in their house.
Update: Bluerazr sez, "The best software to build your own PVR with (and no DRM!!), imnsho, is Snapstream's Beyond TV. Not only can you record TV shows free and clear to MPEG-2 files, thanks to the broadcast flag being struck down, when they launch Beyond TV 4 in a month or so, they'll have native over the air HDTV/Digital TV support — once again, free and clear, regular MPEG-2 transport streams. They also have a feature called SmartSkip which detects commercial breaks and lets you skip between them and ShowSqueeze which lets you compress video to different formats including Windows Media and DivX. The program guide is also free (no subscription fees). I highly recommend it (I'm a long time user and beta tester)."
Update 2: Chris sez, "Since there's all this talk about building your own PVR, what better than a video showing you how. BTW, check out all of the other videos available on the site."
Episode 2 – MythTV
For under $500 you can build a computer that will record HDTV, schedule your favorite shows anywhere in the world, allow you to back up and archive your standard or high def content, display your favorite RSS news feeds, and play all your old-school MAME roms. All this without any monthly subscription fee, made possible with MythTV.In this episode we start with the basics of selecting your capture card. Then, we present what many consider to be the easiest way to install and configure MythTV, knoppMyth. Finally, we end the episode with the configuration and setup of knoppMyth.
