These are the days where the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) device rules the living room. DVR boxes are those little TIVO-like (and even TIVO itself) devices that sit on top of or next to a television and record shows. Much like the VCR of old but digitally using hard drives (the same kind of drives inside your computer that stores your music, pictures, and movie). The DVR has changed the way people watch TV by allowing their owners to watch television on their own schedule. Not home in time to catch that new episode of My Name is Earl on Thursday? Not a problem, with the DVR you can set it up to record all the latest episodes and then you can watch them when you get home or on Sunday after you wake up. As always however, with a new invention comes the do-it-yourselfers of the world to try and build their own and the DVR is no exception. There are several different pieces of software available for a do-it-yourself DVR builder, some are free and some cost money. While several of them are available to download via the internet the question remains, is building your own DVR a cost effective alternative to buying a TIVO (or something like it). In today’s blog post I would like to focus on the pros and cons of building your own DVR system.

To begin, we really should focus on the Tivo. The latest available unit is at bare minimum an eighty hour recording Tivo with something called “dual tuners”. With Dual Tuners you can watch one program off your cable/satellite box and record another off regular over the air television. So you can two programs at once but not off your cable. I’m aware that Tivo Series 3 boxes will be able to record 2 channels off of a cable feed but, those boxes are not out yet. You get the ability to record your favorite programs using what TIVO calls a “Season Pass”, and this will record every new episode of a particular show no matter what time it comes on. And last but not least, for a small fee you can have access to a website that will allow you to schedule a recording from anywhere you have an internet connection. The other typical features you expect are available as well; you can view photos, listen to internet radio/podcasts, and even connect to Yahoo! weather and traffic. You get all of this for $19.95 a month after a $30 box fee (the actual Tivo box) which comes to $270 dollars after your first year and $240 each year after that. So while you can get everything in a “one size fits all” solution, you are going to pay a fee to use it. And since you are more than likely going to enjoy the device and service, you will also most likely use it for more than one year.

So what do you get when you build your own DVR system? Well lets start off with a con, you’ll have to build it yourself, which means you will also have to pay for the parts yourself. Depending on the system you choose to build it could cost you as little as $400 and as much as over $1000. Of course the cost of the system one builds is directly related to prices of the components they wish to go with at the time hence the huge fluctuation. Not only do you have to pay for the parts but you might also have to pay for the copy of Windows you install on the box as well as the software you choose to use as your DVR software (more on these later) there are however ways to lower your cost in this area.

Lets begin with the box itself. There are several areas to consider when choosing the components for DVR box you might build. First and foremost is the video capture card. This single piece of equipment will be the basis for everything else later down the road. The kind of card you get will help you decide how much power you need in your processor as well as the amount of RAM you’ll need to put into the box. Most of the nicer cards have built on hardware en/decoding so the processing for the video is done on the card and not your processor. You’ll probably also need IR card so that you can control your satellite/cable box(es). And definitely a network card, wired or wireless it doesn’t really matter just so long as you can connect to the internet.

Now, once you have the box installed your next choice is operating system. Your choice here will have some bearing on the software you can run. If you run Windows it’s going to cost you the “Microsoft tax” but you’ll have more choices over software. Running Linux will provide you with a cheap operating system (free) but will limit your overall software choices down to two items.

So far we’ve proven that by building your own digital video recorder that a major pro is choice. You are not limited to any one piece of software or way of doing things and this is just hardware and operating system. Where the choices really come into play is on the actual recording frontend. You have so many choices, including but not limited to Window Media Center, SageTV, and Snapstream for Windows based systems as well as MythTV and Freevo for the Linux user. Each has their own way of doing things but most of them let you do the same kinds of things. For instance all of these options allow you to play DVDs, watch movies from a hard drive, listen to music, view photos, and a couple of them even pull back information from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Most of these systems also have plugins that will pull weather information, RSS feeds, and other things as well.

The difficultly lies in the recording two channels at once. The way a DVR works is, the second you tune into a channel it starts recording. This allows you that nice pause, rewind, fast forward option that makes a DVR so great. So by default you are pretty much limited to one recording and watching one show at a time. To record one show and watch another you will need two tuner cards in your home built DVR (some companies make cards that have two tuners already on them). If you want to to this with cable or satellite, well you’re going to need 2 boxes and at least 2 cards in your system. Not to mention having to set up the infared stuff to make your DVR control those two boxes. So to get some of the really nice functionality out of the DVR you’ll have to put a lot more work into it.

In conclusion, as with anything where there is an over the counter solution, the do it yourself route has it’s downsides. But while there are some downsides, the upside of choice and extra features might make some people over look the cons and build their own system. I have personally dealt with both systems in some fashion and I was quite pleased with both. If the Tivo Series 3 boxes were not so expensive, I might be inclined to purchase one. But at the rumored $700 dollars for the box, the home built DVR solution might just be the direction I eventually go.

It is a personal goal of mine to build a multimedia PC and a home built network attach storage that I can load my DVDs onto and use the PC to view them on my TV. Imagine never having to pull another DVD or CD out of it’s place to watch or listen to it. Yea, that would be cool.

[Technorati Tag: Technology]
[Technorati Tag: Television]
[Technorati Tag: DVR]
[Technorati Tag: Tivo]
[Technorati Tag: Media]