Personal Video Recorders Pleasing the Masses

By SKillBot January 29, 2000 8:00 PM

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Perhaps you've heard of products like TiVo and ReplayTV where you can watch hours of autmatically recorded television at your convenience.?Though they're expensive (about $700 for the 20 hour ReplayTV model with included service), they are every bit as useful as you would imagine.?I'm looking at a DIY kit for about $400.?The TiVo model runs linux, but it only holds 14 hours of video.?I couldn't imagine needing that much time, though.?By far, the coolest feature is that you can start watching something while it's still on with enough of a delay to skip all the commercials.?Read more...

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RE: Personal Video Recorders Pleasing the Masses   reply

Posted by cmaraschino (cliff@DO-NOT-SPAM-ME.justcreated.com) on January 30, 2000 10:49 AM

Hey,

Where can I find the DIY instructions?!?!?!?!?!

Cliff

RE: Personal Video Recorders Pleasing the Masses   reply

Posted by A random shemp (No Email) on January 30, 2000 11:20 PM

There are a couple of basic components to doing this:

- Grab the video (Viedo4Linux should be able to do this)
- Compress the video in real-time
- Write the video to disk in real-time
- Download scheduling information from the net
- Implement a GUI in the TV-out to program the recorder, select playback, etc. 

The realtime grabbing and encoding seems difficult to do cheaply with off the shelf hardware. Maybe someone has some pointers that I haven't seen (I'd love to hear about them!)


tjw@omnigroup.com