After much dithering, I have finally ordered nearly all of the hardware needed to build our MythTV box, an open source equivalent of the TiVo, with which we had so much fun in the US.
I’d been enamoured with the idea of building my own intelligent DVR ever since Peter, my office mate back in Mountain View, unpacked his MythTV hardware in front of me and explained that he was going to build one. That was last July or so, right after having a baby and right before leaving the country. Needless to say, I had no time back then to be building new computers.
I did wonder if I should purchase the hardware for such a box before leaving the US, given the cheaper prices over there, but I decided not to. After all, I might never get around to actually building the box at all, which would be rather a waste. And, even if I did get around to it, better hardware would likely have hit the market in the interim.
So, within a few days, I should have the hardware in house and can start assembling the system. I hate building computers, so I’m looking forward to having that part done and then getting onto the software configuration part, which is much more my thing. I’ll detail the hardware once I have it all assembled, as I’ll then be able to report on any oddities that I experienced while putting the system together.
DVR DIY is much more expensive than simply purchasing a TiVo, but then again, that isn’t an option in The Netherlands. TiVo doesn’t sell their system over here. One or two people offer a Windows Media Center Edition computer in the form of a household appliance, and that can do more or less the same thing, but those are expensive for what they are and, whilst it would be easy to set up, I can’t quite bring myself to run Windows on a box that will be central to our TV viewing. Within a very short span of time, I would inevitably run into annoyances or shortcomings in the software and I’d be stuck. With MythTV, since it’s open source, I can just fix the problems.
Besides which, I can make the MythTV box do so much more. Since it’s just a Linux box at its core, it can do anything Linux can. For example, how about a webcam on top of the box, so that we can call up the family in the US and watch them on TV while we chat to them? How about streaming music to the TV from our file server in the cellar? Anything is possible, really.
One problem that will be a little tricky to solve is getting the MythTV box to change the channel of the UPC Mediabox, the set-top box that decodes the encrypted digital TV signal. I’m going to need some form of IR blaster for that part. I have one in mind, but it will mean having it shipped from the US.
Anyway, this should be a lot of fun to set up (as well as a black hole for my time), but by the end, we should have a box that will do pretty much anything we want, when it comes to finding programmes to watch and record. It’ll be very cool to have essentially assembled the system from scratch, having picked out the hardware by hand and then installed the software over the top.
Watch this space.