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Building the Godzilla of PVRs

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Jan 19, 2006 04:39 PM
from the because-you-can dept.
Hardware Hacking Entertainment Hardware
EvolvedHumanoid writes "In a blog post, Percy Bell of SnapStream Media details how he built 'Godzilla', an 11-tuner PVR machine with HDTV support using off-the-shelf components. At $4284.90, the end result sports 1TB storage for recorded content and has to be one of the coolest PVRs ever built."
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  • One of the coolest PVRs ever built? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Caspian (99221) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:41PM (#14513316)
    With all that hardware, I'd guess that it is, in fact, one of the hottest PVRs ever built! ;)
    • Yeah, they make a big point about wanting it to be cool enough to eliminate HTPC fan noise, then choose the latest Intel dual core CPU. Perhaps that part needs a little rethink?
        • How about something from AMD that is comparable in terms of prcessing power, while while generating far less heat [slashdot.org]?

        • Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by JDevers (83155) on Thursday January 19 2006, @06:08PM (#14514081)
          The shows are saved as MPEG-2 and at least the internal cards do the MPEG-2 encoding in hardware. I don't know anything about the USB tuners, but even if they were software encoders, that is a hell of a lot less processor load than you describe. There are no currently available single CPUs that can encode 11 HDTV resolution video streams into MPEG-4 (even ASP, much less AVC) in anything approaching realtime. I'm not actually sure if there is a single CPU that could encode just ONE 1080i video stream into MPEG-4 ASP in real time, but I'm not positive on that (and it is getting close even if not...).

          • Convert to MPEG-4 in Non-realtime (Score:5, Interesting)

            by billstewart (78916) on Thursday January 19 2006, @07:56PM (#14514808) Journal
            The video cards are already converting to MPEG-2 - if you want to squash that to MPEG-4, you don't _have_ to do it in realtime, you just have to have some spare disk space for scratch. You'll almost never be recording 11 shows at once except to be silly - if you can keep up with 2-3 simultaneous recordings, that's almost always enough for realtime, and if you've got too many, you can convert the rest later - or watch them unconverted, if you're in a hurry.

          • Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Slayback (12197) on Friday January 20 2006, @12:17AM (#14516523)
            BeyondTV does use quite a bit of CPU just to do the commercial skipping scan after a program is recorded. If you have 11 shows recording at once, it'll take quite a bit of CPU to scan through all that content to remove commercials. I have a P3 and while everything works great, the comskip scanning gets behind after a while because the CPU can't keep up.
    • I'd guess that it is, in fact, one of the hottest PVRs ever built!

      Not to mention over 1TB of recorded shows, and STILL nothing to watch!

  • Mindless overkill... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FalconZero (607567) * <[moc.liamG] [ta] [oreZnoclaF]> on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:42PM (#14513320)
    four Seagate 250GB SATA drives for storing our BTV recordings and two Seagate 160GB SATA drives for the OS and other applications.
    320GB for OS and Applications?!?!? - I know Windows is a bit bloated but why the hell would you want 320GB for Apps? Thats 68DVD's worth of application! And I only know of a handfull of apps that are DVD sized. And before anyone says "maybe they've got lots of (big) games" this thing is specifically (and clearly obvious from the hardware) a PVR.
    • I haven't RTFA yet but unless it says otherwise it's probably a RAID 1.
      • Probably not, they specifically mention that the 'data' drives (the 4 250gbs) are raid 5, and say nothing of the 160s. Anyway, since this is intended to be a PVR why bother with mirroring? Why not just install all of the (supposedly enormours) applications, and dump the drive to tape?

        • Re:Mindless overkill... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:51PM (#14513423) Homepage Journal
          Having a mirror means no downtime, which means never missing a show (or, perhaps, 11 shows) because your PVR is down. It's excessive, but it's not without reason.
            • In building several-terabyte arrays from IDE drives - with dedicated fans blowing right over the drives, and HUGE fans ventilating the case - I've found that when you're talking about nearly a dozen drives, it's not long before you're going to have a failure. In large arrays of Maxtors, Seagates, and Western Digitals, I have yet to go a year without at least one drive failing.

              In fact, just a couple of days ago, one of my Western Digital RAID edition drives started hiccuping, and got dropped out of an array

        • Re:Mindless overkill... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:03PM (#14513514)
          No, the 4 250gb's are striped, which is how they got 1 TB out of the whole array with 4 drives and not 12:

          We configured the four 250GB drives as RAID 0 (striping) and formatted them with NTFS and 64k blocks to increase the disk size and performance.

          Seems silly - if one drive goes, the whole array dies - and on a beast like this, heat is likely to SERIOUSLY degrade the life of those drives...
          • Seems silly - if one drive goes, the whole array dies - and on a beast like this, heat is likely to SERIOUSLY degrade the life of those drives...

            OK, so you loose couple of hours of 'Desparate Housewifes' .... who cares, just wait for next week's episode. :-)

            Seriously, the data you store on the drive of a PVR is not really "mission critical". So, I can understand if someone makes the trade-off for capacity versus redundancy.

          • Re:Mindless overkill... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2006, @06:16PM (#14514141)
            I hate to be a pain here, but it really seems like this guy has alot more money than sense. There are several strange design decisions that have been made, and it seems to show someone who really isn't knowledgable.
            • Using a massive chip - For what, exactly? As long as you have a reasonable video card, the need for a fat cpu for videos is very minimal. I suppose its possible that HDTV may require faster speeds, but i doubt this. AFAIK, win32 currently doesn't really take advantage of dual core.
            • Using RAID 0. - Is he trying to get a drive burnt out?
            • Using NTFS - This is where it gets strange. I think that if you were fucking around with 1TB of data, you would want to choose your OS primarily by filesystem. Hell, I would. NTFS is one of the least stable, worst performing filesystems around. I would probably want to use XFS (it has this tendency to stack writes to the RAM before making them, reducing drive wear - I forget the name) and noflushd, so as to keep hd wear to a minimium (considering that there are gonna be long periods where no writes are done). Eventually, you could feasibily switch to ZFS to keep space use high.
            • Some defense of choices:

              Dual Core/Dual CPU - any thread or process can be split off onto the additional cores (ok, with some OS limitations), so having multiple of them is a good thing to handle writes and reads from all those tuners. Disk reads/writes are one of the worst processor eating functions (though caching helps), as they have one of the longest pipelines and tend to stall it. Windows itself doesn't do threading well (at least to use up extra CPU/cores), but extra processes will benefit from the
    • Probably Raid 1, and 160GB drives are pretty cheap anyway... why not?
    • And before anyone says "maybe they've got lots of (big) games" this thing is specifically (and clearly obvious from the hardware) a PVR


      Yeah, because it makes no sense to play games on the kick-ass PC you just built and hooked up to your best TV / media distribution system. Probably better to put the games elsewhere.

      • That's what I was going to say, eleven tuners and only 1TB of HD? And the HD is only RAID0 to boot (and the primary reason for RAID0 here is performance because you are going to need fast disk I/O if you get 11 tuners all trying to work at the same time). In this situation if one of the four drives goes down, you lose a lot of data. I'd rather see multiple PVR backends managing the tuners, each tuner with its own dedicated drive. Double the number of drives and go to RAID1 and then you don't have to worry a

        • eleven tuners and only 1TB of HD?

          That's the part that leapt out at me, too. I've got a TB on this computer; and while only about half of it is available for video, it's a constant struggle keeping enough space free.

          A single English Premier League football match, recorded at even medium quality, is a 3.5 GB dump from our ReplayTV. A single episode of Nova, recorded at high quality, is 2.5 GB. If I use my computer's ATI tuner instead, I can get a decent (SVCD) quality episode of Nova in for about 1 GB; b

  • Pentium EE...dual core with htt...bad combination...very silly choice. FX-60 would be more impressive.
        • Hmm, that starts to make me wonder when you move nearly everything but the pretty case into another room (because doing it the 'Godzilla' way obviously doesn't scale well).For not much more cash you could take all the contents of this PVR, put it in a case that will let it breathe, and stick it in the office/basement/etc for it to make as much noise as it wants. You run a fiber to carry the audio/video output from the server to the viewing room. Then you build a cheap, slim, sexy, dumb terminal of an HTPC
  • Manufacturer's Warning:

    Not suitable for resale in Japan.

    • Re:Manufacturer's Warning: (Score:4, Informative)

      by identity0 (77976) on Thursday January 19 2006, @07:12PM (#14514537) Journal
      I know you're joking, but really, it wouldn't work - because they already have [sonystyle.com] kickass PVRs. That Sony beast has 11 tuners (1 sat, 10 analog broadcast), 1 Gig RAM, 1 TB HDD, built-in streaming server (WLANa/g, LAN), DVD+-R/RW/RAM - all for 27,9800 yen, or $2,421.88. Oh, and it has an Intel Pent-D 820 and GeForce 6200(256MB).

      Or This thing [sonystyle.com], which I think is a pure PVR with no PC, 8 tuners, (Cable and broadcast), up to 2 TB HDD, $776.95.

      Somehow, I doubt they need to import giant jerry-rigged American PVRs.

      oh, and why is it that Japan makes products that are *so* much more attractive looking than American ones? Only Apple seems to match them in aesthetics...

  • Over kill (Score:5, Funny)

    by Belseth (835595) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:42PM (#14513336)
    an 11-tuner PVR machine with HDTV support using off-the-shelf components.

    Is there 11 channels of porn?

  • The Software (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dch24 (904899) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:44PM (#14513346) Journal
    Who else thinks that Beyond TV 4 Server, at $69.99, is a really great price for software that can keep all those eleven tuners busy at once? !!

    Is this the result of open source driving the price of software down? If this were a Microsoft product, just the word "Server" on the package would cost you an additional $300 or more.

    • Re:The Software (Score:5, Informative)

      by thebosz (748870) <thebosz@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:13PM (#14513613) Homepage Journal
      If you'd like a free PVR, I personally like GB-PVR [gbpvr.com]. It can handle as many tuners as your machine can handle plus it has a bunch of additional features. Beyond TV, Sage TV and Microsoft MCE all cost money, but none of them do anything that GB-PVR can't.

      It's not open source, unfortunately, but has a very active development guy and a very good plug-in architecture.

      My PVR is an AMD Sempron 2200+ with 768MB RAM, 360GB Hard drive space, two Hauppauge tuners (250 and 150-MCE) running in a small case on a Chaintech 7NIF2 board running Win2000. Everything works flawlessly and my wife loves it! She records all her shows and watches them whenever she wants. I've got about half of our DVD collection ripped and converted to Xvid sitting on there, ready to go (those discs aren't getting anywhere near the kids!) and everything is awesome.

      When we move into our house, I'm going to run network through the walls and have a Hauppauge Media MVP [hauppauge.com] as a small, quiet front-end in the bedroom.

      The PVR itself is fairly noisy, but when the TV's on, you can't hear it so it doesn't really matter. When I do an upgrade, I might get another MVP and put the main server into the closet.

      I originally tried MythTV (using KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv]), but after a week of hassle and wrestling with it, I gave up and tried GB-PVR. I haven't tried MythTV since. I'd like to have only open-source, free software running, but I couldn't get it to work. I hope to be able to switch over in the future, but for right now, we're quite happy.

  • Fan failure? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WhiteWolf666 (145211) <moornblade at gmail.com> on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:44PM (#14513350) Homepage Journal
    That's a whole lot of heating being generated. Exhaust fan failure=lots of dead harddrives?

    What about heat on the TV tuners? Or the video card?

    Methinks one would be much better serviced by a rack of systems, this thing would run WAY too hot.

  • I always love to hear about stuff like this. However, good luck finding enough content worth recording. I have a PVR with 1 tuner and I struggle for stuff to record. Most of TV is crap except for Battlestar Galactica of course and Family Guy :)

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

  • Mine is bigger (Score:4, Interesting)

    by killercoder (874746) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:45PM (#14513363)
    My Setup:

    2.6 Terrabytes of Disk Space (2x Raid 5 array's in 2x chassis').
    6 Tuners - 2 SDTV, 2 HDTV, 2 Digital Cable (QAM256)

    MythTV is very powerful, supports alot of tuners, and ALOT of folks out there have small-to-large setup's. 2005 was the year of the PVR - this article is simply a mine is bigger statement that can't be backed up.
      • Yea, but isn't Myth a PITA to get setup correctly? Much less getting linux drivers to work with some hardware.

        On Gentoo Myth was no sweat, just a normal install. The hardware I'm using is a USB DVB tuner I bought for 50 quid. 2.4.13 Kernel already had support built in so it was plug-and-play! Myth has actually been the easiest hardware upgrade (apart from new harddrives) I've ever had on Linux.

        I did have some problems with the programme guide, but only because I was greedy and wanted two weeks in advance

      • I was using KnoppMyth. For some reason, the function of "don't record if the disk is full" has never been turned on, or else never worked. I sure couldn't find docs about it, and queries to knowledgeable Myth Advocates were mostly responded to with "just update to the latest CVS" which...is not what I'm looking for. After the most recent round of "I don't have enough time to watch everything I record" filled up the partition AND trashed the database, I gave up. TiVo is in my future.

  • Heh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aftk2 (556992) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:45PM (#14513369) Homepage Journal
    While this is mostly a solution in search of a problem, it would be kind of cool to have in a dorm room environment. You could install it, and then have some sort of signup process through which users reserve specific chunks of time, for their various shows. While it's doubtful that one person would ever want to watch 11 programs that were on simultaneously, 11 different people might.

  • It's a giant ad! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsborg (111459) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:47PM (#14513384) Homepage
    Ok, absurdity of 11 tuners aside, I noticed some serious warning signs that this project really didn't seem all that well thought out, and instead seems like a huge AD for beyondTV, Intel, and pretty much all the "high end" components you need for your media center type beast.

    "Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system. "
    Uh... sure. Agreed.

    "You have to sometimes sacrifice a quiet HTPC so the machine can cool itself efficiently. "
    Hmm... so it supposed to be quiet, but not really.

    "We choose the Intel Pentium D 840 "Extreme Edition" Processor!"
    Ok, quiet is RIGHT OUT now, and what a way to add to your heat problem :-)

    "While trying to push the Godzilla PVR to its limit we experienced an overheating and fan noise issue. "
    LOL. Stopped reading right about there.

    • my favorite is the first pics.. al the hardware layed out.. on carpet... carpet. not a table but carpet.. that has to be good for all that stuff

      • Re: carpet (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        In that pic they are trying to use the static electricities to loosen up the electrons. With the electrons loosened they can tranfer the datas faster. They said when the electrons are too tight only 10 of the tuners can be used at a time.

    • The biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC (Score:5, Funny)

      by lildogie (54998) on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:08PM (#14513567)
      "Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system."

      With _noise_ a close second?
  • make popcorn! And then, get a soda machine or beer keg, catheter for, well, you know and...voila! The ULTIMATE home enterainment system.

  • Mirrors (Score:3, Informative)

    by alexhs (877055) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:48PM (#14513391) Homepage Journal
    Blog already slow (database connection error at first try), following mirrors had time to do their job :
    MirrorDot [mirrordot.org]
    and nyud.net [nyud.net]
  • I would add a decent remote control, like the Logitech Harmony 890 [logitech.com] for about $400 (that's right!), merely 10% of the total cost. ;-)

  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    by c0d3h4x0r (604141) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:52PM (#14513434) Homepage Journal
    Too bad they didn't build the Godzilla of Servers to go with it.

  • Confusingly unuseful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heatdeath (217147) on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:01PM (#14513492)
    I used to live in a house with 7 people, and we had a DVR that had 2 tuners. (so, you could record on one, and watch on the other)

    Occasionally we would have conflicts with someone recording a movie during a regularly recorded TV show, and someone else was bored and wanted to surf channels - but even with 7 people, 3 or 4 tuners definitely would have done it. 11 is so overkill it's not even funny.

    However...technology for technology's sake, I suppose.

  • waste $ on h/w won't pay for content (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:03PM (#14513518)
    I don't get this geeky thing where you'll spend godawful amounts of money on hardware (and create a huge electricity bill and cooling problem to boot) but take a hissy fit about paying for a DVD or a CD you want to enjoy. It reminds me of clients my law firm had who'd spend gobs of money for us to fight their personal tax assessments.

    At $15 each, you could buy 285 DVDs. I can guarantee that when you pay for entertainment you're a lot more choosy about what you watch. It reminds me of software pirates who spend so much time and energy collecting software (or porn fanatics, too, I guess) but never actually enjoy what they've collected.

  • 11 Tuners? Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pedrito (94783) on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:34PM (#14513808) Homepage
    I have a two-tuner TiVo with my DirecTV. I record TONS of movies. Most of it I capture and write DVD. I very rarely have a conflict where I'm trying to record more than 2 things at once, and even when it has happened, I've always been able to find at least one alternate time among the three movies to reschedule one. 3 tuners, and I'd NEVER run into the problem. 11 tuners? Who the fuck needs 11 tuners? Sorry, but this article goes into my "Waste of time and money" bin.

  • Godzilla... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cryptnotic (154382) * on Thursday January 19 2006, @06:23PM (#14514193) Homepage
    ...meet Slashdot.

    • They do if you already have hardware laying around. For instance, I have a couple of AthlonXP 1800's sitting around, so I'm considering building a PVR out of them. The fact that they're on NForce2 motherboards with SoundStorm and SPDIF out doesn't hurt, either.

    • Re:That's The Problem (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Hatta (162192) on Thursday January 19 2006, @06:32PM (#14514269) Journal
      As soon as you buy a PC with enough CPU or Video horsepower, you have already spent more than double what an off the shelf unit would cost.

      But what does that doubled cost get you? You get a machine that works the way you want, instead of one crippled for end users. If a component goes bad, you can replace it with off the shelf parts. You can manage your massive collection of tv shows with the standard unix tools. Plus, you can play arcade games [mythtv.org] while not watching tv. Also, do any commercial DVRs come with RAID5?

      So there are several ways in which home built DVRs are superior to off the shelf DVRs. Whether they're worth the extra cost is up to you.
    • Snapstream built a box with 10 tuners a while ago. http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/hydr a /default.asp [snapstream.com] They used five Hauppauge PVR-500MCE cards which each have two tuners.

      These guys used an odd mix: 3x Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500, 1xAnalog PCIe Tuner: PowerColor, and 4x Digital HDTV Tuners.
      So I guess the 3 analog cards are 2 tuners each, then the other analog tuner, and 4 HDTV via USB = 11.

      Spinal Tap would be proud.

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