Raffi Krikorian, the hacker from the MIT Media Lab who wrote the TiVo Hacks book for O'Reilly, is now hot to build an Ur-PVR out of commodity PC parts. He's offering to do it if someone will put up the money ($1200) for parts, just for the experience.
for the grand total of $1200 i can probably assemble you a via epia m10000, 512 MB DDR RAM, 250 GB HD, CDRW/DVD, and two WinTV-PVR cards. armed with this, you can record two shows simultaneously, stream MPEGs off the PVR, play back DiVX on your television, play DVDs, record radio, burn VCDs, stream and play MP3s, use xmltv for program information — all through the really spiffy mythtv interface. really – i'm not kidding. if you're interested in me building one (note, that the doesn't cover some cash for me), drop me a note. i think
