[SWLUG] Open PVRs [ was petition against BBC's Windows-only iPlayer]

[Steve Hill]

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Keith Edmunds wrote:

>> some of us choose to use PVRs that store
>> un-DRM'd files and run a completely Free software stack
>
> This is something I'm very interested in, and I'd like to know what
> people are using, and what the pros and cons of each approach are.

I'll give you a quick run down of what I've got set up:

I have an Athlon XP 2100+ running MythTV and a Sky Minidish with a 
quad-LNB.

The MythTV box has a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus card plugged directly into the 
minidish.

I also have a Sky Digibox plugged into the dish.  The MythTV box also has 
a Hauppauge WinTV/PCI (BT878) card and this is connected to the Sky box 
via an S-Video connection.  The MythTV box uses an infrared transmitter to 
control the Sky box.

So all the free to air channels can be received directly through the 
Nova-S-Plus card, and the free to air, free to view and subscription 
channels can be received (at significantly lower quality) through the Sky 
box and software encoded to MPEG4.

The MythTV box is also connected to a infrared receiver and I use a Sky 
Navigator remote control to control it (which has a nice full QWERTY 
keypad inside it :)

It works reasonably well for me, although if I could ditch the Sky box 
from the setup it would save a lot of CPU time and allow higher quality 
recordings of non-free-to-air content.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence