How to get rich
Okay, not being a technogeek (please keep reading!) this article came as a suprise to me.
My first thought - Boris could make a ton, a ton I say, of money building and installing these open source digital video recorders for people. Everything's not as open-standardsy as they suggest here - XMLTV my ass. Not something the average person would have the patience to fool with, but boy would they (I) enjoy a cheap DVR customized for my digital system (LOOK TV in my case). Of course, my 15 year old, 13" TV set would probably need to be upgraded. Enough blather - read on...
Thanks to several open-source projects, you can build your own digital video
recorder that will blow boxes from TiVo and ReplayTV right off the shelf.
About a dozen collaborative software projects are in the works that will
transform a spare computer, or one built from off-the-shelf parts, into a
homemade digital video recorder, or DVR. They also can record multiple shows
simultaneously, archive shows to video CD, play digital music and computer
games and display photographs and local weather forecasts.
Thanks to the combined expertise of about half a dozen hackers from all over
the world, the project is close to assembling a complete software package for
homemade DVRs. Version 0.9 of the MythTV software is due out next week.
Based on Linux, the free software features an easy-to-use graphical interface,
which can be navigated with a standard remote.
The MythTV software offers all the basic DVR features -- it can pause and
rewind live TV, and fast-forward through shows and ads. It supports multiple
tuner cards (and multiple simultaneous recordings) and boasts
picture-in-picture capability if there's more than one tuner card installed. It
also offers basic video-editing capabilities and allows shows to be archived to
video CD.
MythTV grabs programming information from the Net using XMLTV, an open-source
project that scrapes television listings off the TV Guide website.
For example, Raffi Krikorian, author of a forthcoming book called TiVo Hacks,
is planning to build a MythTV DVR from scratch that will record two shows at
the same time, store about 250 hours of programming, play DivX movies
downloaded from the Net and archive shows to video CD. The DVR also will record
radio and play MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other audio formats, while grabbing free
programming information from the Web.
MythTV has a nifty distributed architecture that allows multiple machines to
work in concert, recording and streaming shows to each other over a network.
There are about a dozen home-brew DVR projects, all based on Linux. Others
include Freevo, eBox and the Dave/Dina Project. Krikorian said MythTV was
probably the most complete and up-to-date. A list of the projects can be found
at the Linux PVR Depot, which also maintains a database of the hardware used by
various people.
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Comments
Working with Look TV?!?
I as well have Look TV, and am wondering how you were able to get this working. How are you changing the channels? Are you using an IR transmitter to control the cable box? If so, could you post (here or at mythtv.org) some info?!?
I ahve been thinking about the switch back to Rogers, just to get my myth box back.
JC.
Sorry JC -- none of us are ac
Sorry JC -- none of us are actually running this yet. How are you liking Look TV? Are you in Ottawa?
After my vacation ...
so mid July...
OK, Dave, when?
Here's another article from ExtremeTech about building the ultimate TiVo PC.
Why not use a Mini-ITX system?
Is the Via C3 not fast enough? The video chipset is supposed to be powerful enough to handle regular video.
Not enough power
Nope -- the Via systems might be fine for playing back encoded video, but I don't know if I would trust them to encode the video.
Of course, running Linux, anything is possible. I would have to revisit all my sites to check on recommended minimum hardware.
The new Via will
manage to handle MythTV recording 2 channels simultaneously I heard.
The Via Nehemiah M10000 mobo.
Also, I'm hearing that Serial ATA rocks for media recording/editing/streaming uses. 800FSB/SATA/Firewire/GigE mobos are under $200 now.
oh come on now...
So here's the getting rich part. You still need some secret sauce, and in this case it's being the first person to figure out how to reduce the hardware cost way down. The other costs are software (free) and systems integration (your time). So one last little problem sits between you and a $200 margin * 60,000 households in greater Ottawa.
I'm being a little fascetious, but really the DVR should be the next big consumer appliance, and the revenue stream from consumers is so large, due to their vast number....it's just one little problem to solve. Does it really have to be $1000?
Hardware costs
Shuttle XPC barebones case - $500
256MB memory - $40
80GB hard drive - $120
Video card - $200 (*potentially* just a tuner card for $80)
Processor - $130
Sums to $990 before taxes...
Instead of the Shuttle, you could just get a small case ($60) plus a regular motherboard (~$150) plus a fan, etc. etc. I haven't included an optical drive of any kind yet, but they are not that expensive (~$80 for a CD-RW/DVD).
It remains pretty close to $1000. And Sony is coming out with the PSX which will have a 120GB hard drive *plus* a DVD burner.
If you want to help, I'd be happy to work more on this....
I'd read somewhere...
... Maybe at MythTV or another one of the software bundle sites about per video stream processor requirments... Got a line on that Boris?
And I'll be building one in August I think.... after my vacation... :)
We can start the countdown now...
Dave
Personal experience says
approx equiv-750MHz-Duron+64MB per stream for encoding, in Linux or Windows.
I should've been more specific,
I was referring to MPEG4 type (DivX, XviD, etc) encoding. Anything less leaves huge unwieldy files.
The MPEG2 HW encoders on TV cards and in TiVo/Replay machines produces pretty large files, about 1GB/hr for something that approaches the original broadcast, while a DivX has excellent quality at 500MB/hr in the easier-to-manipulate AVI format.
HW MPEG4 encoders are on their way.
Unmentioned here, but in playback use: if the CPU is doing the decoding, the smoothness of normal play, FF, RR, slow are all contigent on CPU/RAM/FSB/diskIO being able to keep up.
2 R + 1 PB
So for two channels recording and one playback would it require a 2Ghz processor then? Some of the TV capture boards must offload some of the video encoding... No?
Plus 3 tuners
Plus, you would need three tuners, or? It is late...
But, video cards only have DECODE chips, note ENCODE.
No... Only two tuners...
I think recording two things and watching one from disk is enough... (that is recording one show and providing the ability to watch/pause another) must run into bus limitations at some point as well...
Prices
I just stumbled on this (nice page/blog btw). Your prices are.. well nutty. I guess if your used to buying overpriced off the shelf systems from the nearest outlet thats reasonable.. for most of us not. You can build a desktop in the 2.2 to 3 ghz range for $35(mb) + 40 (ram) + processor ($40-75) + HD ($100. or less) + peripherals (tv card 80, dvd burner 70). Of course if you want a cube you might have to pay an extra 100.. to be "cool". It might be smarter of course to use a multiprocessor system to offload the encoding (so you dont bog the main processor). And its not onlly foolish to encode before it hits storage.. it's counterintuitive to any programmer. You "stream" the signal directly to disk and the display. You then have another process (or cpu) encoding the video for storage and possibly another burning . If your homemade tivo is recording dual shows literally 24 hours a day you might run out of space quickly. But otherwise not. It should have time to catch up in off times. And there are better solutions anyway using microcontrollers and dedicated encoding chips (which really arent that hard to deal with. It's becoming positively simple).
You should be able to build a standardised system that will take more video input and add more storage simply by plugging in more/bigger hard drives (and adding more ram for speed).
The prices are Canadian and 3 years old
So they will seem very out of wack right now, on the first day of 2006.
Sure
Trevor -- thanks for the link. Yes, it's true, the average non-technical person definitely can't build a system like this. I have talked about building such a system, and all the components, both hardware and software, are pretty readily available.
Now that the (open source) software is up to snuff, it is relatively easy to make a PVR. I would build one if a) I still had cable and b) I had a spare $1000 laying around.
I had talked with Dave about building him one, since both (a) & (b) hold true for him. And Trevor, if you want one as well, we could build two at the same time. The trick with Look is that it is a separate "box" -- how do you control the channel changing, etc. from the box? These systems are at their simplest when using straight cable, although the quality and content suffer, of course. I'd have to do some research to see if someone has already figured out the Look system.
So, back to your title: How To Get Rich. Well, the problem being, there is not much margin left. Let's say that it would take about 4 hours to put one of these together, with hardware cost of around $1000. Maybe you could charge $1200? That is a big chunk of change.
In any case, I repeat my offer to build one of these for people if they pay for all the hardware. I will donate my time for free. And yes, it will play MP3s as well...