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."

Mine is bigger

[killercoder]

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.

Heh

[aftk2]

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.

Re:Mindless overkill...

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:It's a giant ad!

[Amouth]

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:One of the coolest PVRs ever built?

[JDevers]

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...).

Re:Mindless overkill...

[wwwillem]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What if you are only interested in ...

[DorkusMasterus]

THIS [homeportfolio.com] is the Mothra of Toaster Ovens. aaaaaand, THIS [invisiblethreads.com] is the King Ghidorah of filing cabinets. /me bows.

Re:11 Tuners? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the tuners are needed because they are not multipurpose. For example, the HDTV tuners cannot tune into basic cable and vice versa. So if you wanted to record 3 shows, they could be HDTV only at that particular instance (over the air) or analog cable, so you would need 6 tuners, despite using only 3 at any given time.

Further, news or science junkies that also happen to want to watch regular shows might hae a use for this. For news: CPAN, CPAN2, CPAN3, weatherchannel, CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNBC, Headline News, NASA, PBS (shows BBC International), PCN (Pennsylvania Cable Network, shows German news), 2 or 3 for your regular shows.

On the news ends, I'm not a news junkie, but several times, I've heard of something that occurs afterwards that makes headlines, such as an interview that got out of hand (i.e. Ann Coulter had one I think with an NBC interviewer), that I learned after the fact and wish I had recorded so I could see what really happened instead of watching parsed replays and edited commentary after the fact.

I'd been thinking about building something like this for 2 reasons really--one to have a 24-72 hour store of news channel material. Also, sometimes I've found myself wanting to compare ongoing live news coverage, which would require multiple tuners for later comparison of simultaneous recording of coverage.

The other to use as a security camera recorded (you can usually feed directly into a PVR card and if not, tune a security camera into a channel with a modulator).

Granted this is more niche stuff, but I could see myself building a 7 analog and 3 HDTV tuner, although I think I'd use a network of machines that I could power up and down as needed.

Convert to MPEG-4 in Non-realtime

[billstewart]

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.