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Building a Cheapy PVR

H

Hazard

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 30, 2005
Messages
336
I'm looking to put together a dirt cheap PVR that's small, reasonably quiet and can replace my VCR. Nothing fancy as it's just being paired up with an old Sony TV that doesn't even have S-Video In. Here's what the used parts I was thinking about getting from a friend or already have:

Biostar iDEQ 200V
Athlon XP1700+, XP1800+ or XP2100+
2 x 512MB PC3200 DDR
Maxtor 80GB 2MB 7200RPM IDE
IBM 120GB 2MB 7200RPM IDE
ATi Radeon LE 32MB w/ TV-Out
LG 16x DVD+/-RW
Card Reader
ATi TV Wonder PCI
ATi Remote Wonder

Very basic. Just wanna record SDTV and watch DivX / XviD / and all those billions of containers. I haven't decide if I'm going Windows or Linux (never tried Linux) so any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
Looks fine. Although I'm not sure about that remote and tuner card. But spec wise it's way more than enough for SDTV.

Personally I'd go with Windows and SageTV.
 
TType85 said:
WIndows & SageTV would be good.

I would get a Hauppauge 150 or ATI 550 based card to do the recording. I am not sure if the ATI TV Wonder is hardware based MPEG2 or not.

Something like this setup:
http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/54/products_id/148

or this one
http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/43/products_id/146
Click to expand...
The ATi TV Wonder is software based MPEG-2. I have it along with the remote from a previous build for fun. It actually worked with GB-PVR!

I was thinking of upgrading to an ATi 550 later but the TV Wonder will have to do for now. Is there a difference between using the XP1700 (Thoroughbred-B) and XP2100 (Palomino)? If not, I'd use the XP1700 so keep it cooler.

Thanks for the input!
 
no both systems would run fine with barely any noticeable difference. It's above the minimum specs for SD.
 
My only other concern is playback of H264 or whatever the new funky codec people are using. I just want to have enough juice to decode some of new format so I can watch it on TV.
 
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