The Great PVR Debacle

1. Blame Apple.

2. I had always wanted a PVR, ever since I heard of TiVo. TiVo is barely still in business, so there’s not much chance of it coming to Australia, so if I wanted one I had to build me own. Then I found out proper HTPC cases are stupendously expensive (this was a while ago, they’ve come down in price but it’s still not cheap), and I dropped the whole idea because it was waaaay out of my budget (which, at little more than $400, barely covered the case at that time).

3. It wasn’t until the Mac mini came out that I started getting interested again. The idea of a headless Mac is a horse I’ve beaten to death on many occasions, so I was interested in one anyway. But there just isn’t any cheap, decent Digital TV options for the Mac platform, and the one that does exists requires a Dual G5 to play smoothly (don’t ask). So that was that, and I had to look elsewhere.

4. I then considered a chipped XBox — plenty of people are doing it, and it works pretty well. Except, I can’t record or watch TV, which is a huge reason for wanting a PVR in the first place. Scrap again.

5. Then a mate introduced me to his PVR, an Athlon 1800+ in a micro ATX box, all built for $450. Brilliant! Just couldn’t resist, went out and bought all the bits (For the geeks: AMD Semperon 2200+, ASUS A7V400-MX, 256mb of Generic RAM, Gigabyte Radeon 9000 with TV-out, 160Gb HD, VisionDTV HDTV card) and put it all together. I’m running Win2k, myHTPC, DigitalWatch for TV, DVB Webscheduler for recording, mPlayer and VLC for playing odd videos. It’s taken me about two weeks now massaging everything into place, and so far so good. Digital TV is spectacular, and I can finally enjoy all those episodes of the West Wing on my TV rather than the computer. And all those Anime fansubs. Ohhh, bliss…!

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