Build Your Own PVR, Then Trash It By Ryan Singel Wired News
02:00 AM Mar, 08, 2006 EST http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70328-0.html First, the good news. Plummeting storage costs and the availability of special hardware have finally made it cheap and easy to shrug off the shackles of TiVo and build your own personal video recorder out of an old PC. The bad news is digital-rights management technologies will probably make your homebrew PVR obsolete faster than you can say "Super Bowl Sunday." It was a Super Bowl sale that inspired this reporter to undertake assembly of his own home media center, which proved both delightfully easy and cheap, ringing in at less than $200 -- about the same as 18 months of subscription dues to TiVo. I started with a program called GBPVR, a free (but not open-source) solution developed by a New Zealander named Graeme Blackley. It's configurable and has an active developer community building plug-ins and skins. GBPVR plays nicely with a unique $100 extender device called the MediaMVP that sits in the living room and bridges your computer to your TV and stereo. It's about the size of a CD wallet, and is powered by PowerPC chip and a trimmed down version of Linux. The MediaMVP comes with a very basic interface, but GBPVR tricks it into running different software through an ethernet cable. You can then use MediaMVP's included remote control device to navigate the interface. My two other purchases were a TV-tuner card (in my case a Hauppauge Win-TV 150 PCI card on sale for $50, though many others will also work) and a 200-GB hard drive found for another $50. The initial set up was simple. The hardest parts involved stringing CAT5 cable out one apartment window and into another, and figuring out how to install the hardware Now my 6-year-old Pentium III box whirs away in the office, while my living room TV tells me the weather forecast, plays back internet radio streams, pauses live television, shuffles through thousands of mp3s -- complete with displays of the album art -- and records hours upon hours of The Simpsons, and it never uses more than 5 percent of my CPU's power. Plenty of other options exist for the self-help mediaphile. The Linux-based, open-source MythTV is, by most accounts, now almost painless to install once you have a Linux box set up. SageTV offers inexpensive commercial software that runs on Windows or Linux and works well with MediaMVP. BeyondTV has a fine solution as well. The only real obstacle is getting a network connection between your computer and the living room. The $150 wireless version of the MediaMVP will be out soon. Hard-core geeks have also avoided the whole cable-running process by building quiet PVRs that can sit in an entertainment center, even fitting the hardware into the shell of an old DVD player. For those suspicious of free software, a host of commercial options are at your disposal. You can buy a brand new PC, running Windows Media Center Edition, and pair it with an Xbox 360 in the living room. You can plug in a series of Apple's clever AirPort Express wall plug-ins to play digital music files. You can use the long-awaited TiVoToGo service to burn television to DVD or watch it on a PSP. And the Squeezebox and Sonos elegantly stream digital music throughout your house. After overcoming my initial reluctance, I chose the do-it-yourself approach. It's not just the pleasure of avoiding the $12 a month to get television listings -- some expensive TiVo alternatives get free listing data. It's the joy of playing my music files everywhere, and knowing that I can save a television show to a DVD without jumping through TiVo's hoops or worrying about copy protection. I can also transcode videos and play them on the PSP or Video iPod without buying locked-up versions from iTules for $2. In short, it's TV your way. More experienced tinkerers describe the same feeling. "To be honest, it really isn't about saving the subscription fee," says PVR guru Erik Pettersen. "That's nice since I'm annoyed by subscriptions. But if you are going to take a PC and put all this time and effort into it, it's not going to be cheaper than a TiVo." Pettersen, a manager of technical solutions for the Connecticut United Way runs BYOPVR.com (short for build your own personal video recorder) in his spare time. He founded his site a couple of years ago after drooling over a TiVo without having the early-adopter cash to buy one. Being in control is the real driver, he says. "If you are using TiVoToGo, you can only use their sanctioned DVD burning software partners and it just gets in the way," Pettersen says. "I'm not running a pirate option -- it's just fair use. If I want to archive Lost off my PVR in order to make room for a Monster Garage marathon, I want to do that without jumping through a billion hoops or feeling like a criminal." Dave Gruska built a PVR to give to his wife as a unique Christmas present and is now sharpening his .NET skills by building a "Sports Score" plug-in for GBPVR. Aaron Brassard built his homebrew unit after finding out that the birth of his child made him miss his favorite TV shows, and diaper costs put TiVo out of his reach. Now he has 10 hours of Thomas & Friends to entertain his son. But the entertainment industry hates Brassard's little boy. Probably all children, really. Puppies, too. How else to explain the dark cloud on the homebrew PVR horizon: the so-called digital rights management schemes that aim to control how consumers use audio and video content. DRM includes technology like Apple's FairPlay (which prevents devices other than Apple's own from playing an iTunes song) and encrypted high-definition channels like ESPN's that can't be recorded in high resolution, unless it's by a device that has been approved by a cable TV consortium. The movie and music industries say DRM is necessary to curb piracy of digital copies of movies and music. But DRM tends to be finicky, and perfectly legal uses of content, such as making a backup copy of a DVD, ripping a CD to MP3s, or extracting video snippets to create a parody or commentary, all become collateral damage. For the home brewer, this means their solution won't work if they upgrade to high-definition cable, because the cable box won't send a readable signal to any tuner card that isn't part of a locked-down environment, such as TiVo or Windows Media Center. You could always unplug your cable box and record free HDTV off the public airwaves, but perhaps not for long. The industry is trying to get Congress to make it illegal to build TV tuners that record broadcast HDTV without including DRM on the recording. That means the only option for a future-proof PVR is to use something like TiVo, Windows Media Center or a cable company-provided recorder, which may or may not think your mp3 player or your second television is secure enough to access your own media. Even Mike Machado, the CEO of SageTV, admits his company's software, which currently records television into the unlocked MPEG2 format, will have to make concessions to get access to encrypted cable HDTV. "We are trying to give consumer all the freedom they can get, but when it comes to accessing content that the studios and content industry are very cautious about, we'll have to incorporate some rights management," Machado says. "Hopefully those industries will work on easy-to-use, affordable services that give you good value. It's hard to tell; it's their choice, it's their content." Do-it-yourselfers are already feeling the pinch. Website administrator Joe Cancilla built his MythTV machine years ago. But now, his shared apartment in San Francisco sports a Comcast PVR so he can record high-definition cable shows from HBO. Now he uses his old MythTV box as a music server. "I really get upset that you cant do what you want with what you record," Cancilla says. Cancilla isn't trying to share HBO's programming on eDonkey -- he just wants to watch it on a portable video player while working out on his gym's elliptical trainer. He's now resigned to trying to get MythTV to record a degraded analog signal through a FireWire port that cable companies are supposed to, but often don't, make available on their digital boxes. It's a cruel time to be a digital couch potato. Just as homebrew PVRs slide into everybody's reach, their future usefulness is shrouded in uncertainty. But there's always a chance that if enough people build their own media masters and refuse to play the DRM game, mounting political and market pressure will prevent cable companies, online music retailers and movie studios from treating everyone like criminals. And maybe then, Joe Cancilla won't have to struggle to watch Six Feet Under with his two feet on the trainer. ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
