Building the Godzilla of PVRs

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."

Mindless overkill...

[FalconZero]

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.

Uh...not so godzilla...

[bassgoonist]

Pentium EE...dual core with htt...bad combination...very silly choice. FX-60 would be more impressive.

The Software

[dch24]

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.

Fan failure?

[WhiteWolf666]

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.

Impressive but useless.

[gasmonso]

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]

It's a giant ad!

[rsborg]

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.

Confusingly unuseful

[heatdeath]

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.

Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built?

[_Sharp'r_]

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?

Re:Mindless overkill...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

waste $ on h/w won't pay for content

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mine is bigger

[nagora]

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 instead of just one.

TWW

Re:Mindless overkill...

[cloudmaster]

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.

Re:Mine is bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, MythTV is a breeze. I did a full gentoo install and got mythtv setup and working in about a day and a half - and most of that time was spent setting up gentoo (first time gentoo/linux user, been using unix for a few years now thou)

Re:New king of the losers...

[King_of_Losers]

The old king was a 45 year old 350lb man who spent his days in his parents basement watching porn and playing WoW pretending to be a 16 year old girl.

you hit the nail right on the head.

Re:Mindless overkill...

[ichimunki]

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 about a drive failure much either.

I mean, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of PVRs? ;)

11 Tuners? Why?

[Pedrito]

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.

Re:One of the coolest PVRs ever built?

[_Sharp'r_]

How about something from AMD that is comparable in terms of prcessing power, while while generating far less heat [slashdot.org]?

DIgital Cable,

[u16084]

Did I miss something about the Digital Cable issue?
In My area, TWC mirrors 95% of the analog channels on the digital tier.
So in order to get my Dig channels i would have have 11 Dig boxes?
Sure everytime you split the cable you lose 3.5 to 7db depending on which leg of the splitter you branch off, nothing a Cable Amplifier cant fix, digital channels are fine to about -15db to -20db, what im wondering is where the Cable Card support?

Re:That's The Problem

[Hatta]

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.

Re:HTPC CPU Choice

[Vorondil28]

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 that sends commands to the server over a network. All the storage and encoding power you want with none of the bulk or noise in the viewing room. :-)

Re:Mindless overkill...

[Ray Radlein]

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; but still, all of those 1 and 2 and 3 GB recordings add up rather quickly if you actually keep them around (and isn't that half the point of a computer-based PVR solution -- the ability to save programming so that you can stream it around the house later?). I love the convenience of being able to pick up our remote control in the living room and watch any one of hundreds of episodes of dozens of series (or dozens of movies) at the press of a button; but even with deleting all of the "watch-once" shows and transcoding like crazy to make the "keepers" smaller, I'm bumping up against my storage ceiling. If I had eleven tuners feeding the beast, I can't even begin to imagine how quickly one measly terabyte would get filled up.