At 3/31/2001 Saturday 10:17 AM, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>I bought a book pc for $169, added some disk, memory, and CPU.
>With a USB video capture, it's almost as good as a TIVO, and has
>no fees ;-)
I've wanted to do something similar, the problem is it seems like a large
amount of work to replicate the functionality that the tivo already does
quite well. I like the tivo user interface, finding linux drivers for any
current video capture card seems near impossible, etc.
But there is hope. The tivo hardware has been hacked to allow an ethernet
interface[1], kits are even being sold[2]. The final piece would be
figuring out video extraction from the tivo. Supposedly the same guys who
did the ethernet hack know how to do this, but they aren't talking. I think
it'll be a short amount of time until someone else figures it out.
Finally, where to store all this newly liberated video? How about a
terabyte raid array for the av rack? With linux software raid and commodity
ide drives[3], one could be built for ~$6K--expensive but not prohibitive.
That's 20+ days of video at tivo medium quality, a multiple of that using
mpeg4.
1. http://www.linuxcare.com.au/tridge/tivo-ethernet/
2. http://www.9thtee.com/tivonet.htm
3. http://www.research.att.com/~gjm/linux/ide-raid.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:15:19 PDT