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author: Ingvar
posted: 8/25/99

Boredom is the mother of invention

My idea is to forget about building my own PC--how about building my own Digital Video Recorder (DVR)?

Seems like a nice project for those coming long winter nights. I'm thinking about something like those products from TiVo and ReplayTV.

The hardware might look something like this:

• a moderately powerful (as in cheap) PC
• TV tuner card
• MPEG encode/decode
• video card with TV-out capabilities
• as many gigs of hard disk as I can afford
• IR transmitter to control the cable set-top box
• IR receiver for a remote control
• modem to connect to TV listings websites

The PC would be running Linux, and I would have to write quite a bit of custom software to make all this play together, but that would be the fun part. I'm not a Linux expert, but I have been a UNIX programmer for 15 years, and I know what device drivers are :-)

I hope this sounds geeky enough that I might get some thoughts and ideas, especially about the needed devices and support for them in Linux.

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