PurePVR

After doing a few posts and talking about all of the different options availble for PVRs, it occured to me that I did not mention once what I use personally.

First, lets start this off with a bit of history. My first foray into the whole PVR / DVR world was with MythTV. I remember the days clearly. I had just purchased my Hauppage 250 tuner card and I was getting giddy. I brought it home and popped it into my system and started installing a Linux distro (I can’t remember which, but most likely Fedora). After a lot of tweking and package installs, I finally got MythTV up and running in a somewhat acceptable manner. Channels came in, they keyboard worked, but my wifi card didn’t have proper support under Linux. I needed the network connectivity to get the new program guides so I hooked up a cat5 network cable. It was quite the eyesore though – going clear across the room.

After fooling around with that for a bit I gave up on it. I didn’t want to spend all of my time trying to get a network card to work, so I decided to try out Windows Media Center Edition 2005. I did this more on a whim than anything else. I sat there and installed the software and let it boot up. Once it did boot up I found that there wasn’t much of a difference between it and Windows XP (I was dead wrong though). Since I knew nothing about the product I had no idea that I actually had to open up the Media Center program to get things going. I messed around with it for a bit (probably under an hour) and I wiped the machine clean and reinstalled Windows XP.

Up until this point, this had all taken place within about a week of me getting the tuner card. With XP now on the machine I found GB-PVR. I soon fell in love with it. GB-PVR has a decent support forum and an active community. I managed to get my Hauppage remote working with it (something I still need to do with my current system) and I had a lot of plugins for things ranging from weather, to movie theatre listings and most importantly commercial skipping features.

I used GB-PVR for months and it worked great. I did have one or two minor hiccups which I did get fixed, but finally it became extremely unstable. My program guide wasn’t updating, my recrodings either ended prematurely or did not record and the system became very sluggish. I tried very hard to get things sorted out, but after a week of not having a functioning PVR I decided it was time to move on. Once again I formatted.

Along with this newest format came a piece of past: Knoppmyth. Knoppmyth a Knoppix based CD which was designed specifically for MythTV. It installs all of the software you need and contains a good amount of drivers. I decided to give MythTV another whirl since I was impressed with it the first time. I sat there one morning installing everything and I got it up and running. Initially I had it running off of a network cable again (mainly so I could download drivers and check for updates) but I did finally manage to get my wifi card working with it. The only pain was that I had to run scripts everytime the machine started up. I finally scripted everything into a file and saved it on disk. I then proceeded to reformat the system since I now knew exactly what features I wanted/needed. I wanted to run a clean system. In the process though the floppy disk was damaged and I lost my script to get my wireless card working. At that point I did not have the patience to put it back together. I had crafted it from about a dozen different web pages and the only copy I had was lost.

Being fed up with everything that I lost I tried GB-PVR once again. Unorftunately between the times that I initially stopped using GB-PVR and came back to it, there were no new versions released. The same problems were still there and so was the frustration.

Discouraged, but not lost, I collected myself and gave Windows Media Center 2005 another whirl. I figure I would try it one more time (for a break if nothing else) before trying MythTV again. This time I installed everything and I found the Media Center program right off the bat. I soon realized what I had missed the previous time. The setup was quite easy and all was working well. The hardest bit I had was trying to figure out how to attach it to my home theater system. Since I already had a DVD player, an Xbox, a cable box and a TV hooked up to it, I decided to get a simple audio out cable and use the Tape input. This worked quite well and I eventually got a soundcard that supports digital out (although that is another sotry).

So as it stands now, I have an AMD Athlon 2400+ CPU, 410GB of hard drive space, 1GB of RAM and a Windows MCE based PVR. I hope to get my Hauppage remote working with it soon (I know it can be done, I just need to sit down and do it). I also have plans to put my MCE box onto the domain I run at home, but that’s a story for another site.

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