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There a several reasons to build a PVR and whoever reaches this page sure has his own intentions to get one as well. So i'll not explain why i built one but how.

The reason i started building my own HTPC named Twonky was that i wanted to have a

  • silent system in a
  • beautiful case that should
  • be able to record and replay analog TV,
  • be able to play various audio and video media formats,
  • be able to play DVDs and audio CDs and i wanted to be able to
  • control the whole thing via TV and a ordinary remote control.
Nice add-ons would be
  • a LCD/VFD display,
  • wakeup and powerdown via remote, timer and network,
  • the option to play games
  • ...

1. Hardware

The hardware selection wasn't completely unrelated to the software choice, but most of the hardware was selected from a pure hardware point of view and fortunately everthing worked under the operating system i finally choose.

1.1 The case

I wanted something that fitted into the living room. I personally like the Silverstone cases, especially the flat ones. The depth of more than 40cm of these cases wasn't a problem for me, since i wanted to place them into our tv and phono rack which has enough space for a case with a depth of over 40cm. I finally choose the Silverstone LC11M, a flat case with integrated VFD display and IR receiver incl. a Soundgraph remote control. The case comes with a set of raiser cards allowing to install two PCI and one AGP cards horizontally. A review of this case in the german computer magazine c't mentioned cooling problems with high end CPUs, so i knew i wouldn't try to install such a beast into Twonky. With the help of the hardware MPEG codec a low end CPU seemed to be able everything from the wish list above. Furthermore the case has front USB and space for a DVD drive and one (or even three) harddisks.

1.2 CPU, motherboard and RAM

The next thing i selected was the motherboard and CPU combo. I wanted something that would draw as less power as possible but that would still provide the power required to decode DVDs in software or run some of the classic game emulators while capturing MPEG video in the background. I decided that nearly any of todays CPUs would be sufficient and that i would be able to select on power consumption only. I chose a mobile Celeron M350 CPU, a 1.3GHz CPU that was meant to be used in notebooks. It consumes aboout 21 watts where a Pentium 4 running at 3GHz consumes over 80 watts.

This selection limited my motherboard choice siginificantly, since the hardware distributor of my choice only had three boards for the mobile CPU in stock. I didn't want the newest technology and at that point was planning on using the TV-Out of a MPEG card to connect to the TV set. So i decided to get the AOpen i855GMEm-LFS, a micro ATX board. It provides:

Since the LC11M has four front USB ports and requires another USB port for the front display and the IR receiver i would have to connect these to three of the four external USB connectors of the board.

I finally bought a single Kingston 512MB simm. Since the mobile CPUs don't support dual channel operation, there's no reason to buy two smaller simms. The 512MB is something i consider "ok". It's enough to run any standard application and since there's no special memory requirement when time shifting tv or so, so don't expect to need more ram.

1.3 MPEG/TV encoder and decoder

Since i already planned on using linux i went the "mainstream" way. This means that i selected Hauppauges PVR series as the grabber card since i new that linux drivers existed for these cards and that they were the first choice for linux based analog TV PVRs. At that time i still wanted to use the video output of the grabber card to connect to the TV set, so i took the PVR-350 which comes with a TV out connector. For the same reason i didn't select a VGA video card but wanted to use the on board VGA during setup and no video card for the final system. Furthermore the card comes with a IR receiver and a remote control. Since the case comes with its own (more interesting) remote control i didn't expect to have a use for MPEG cards IR interface.

1.4 Harddisk, DVD drive

Since i had no special requirements for these, i choose a harddisk big enough to hold some hours of TV and a NEC 3400 DVD drive with a silver front to match the silver of the LC11M.

1.5 Changes in hardware

Things don't always work the way ones expects them to. My original plan was to use the TV out of the PVR card for the complete system incl. the GUI, TV overlay, DVD output and game emulators. The video quality of the PVRs output is great, but the video performance/compatibility when using it as a generic video output device is rather low. This is due to two facts. On one hand the PVR card is a simple PCI card without any 2D or 3D accelerator. Even simple graphics cards are connected to the faster AGP and provide at least basic 2D and 3D acceleration. On the other hand the video drivers for the TV out of the PVR cards are still under development and are currently not as advanced as their counterparts for current graphics cards.

I therefore added an Nvidia MX4000 based AGP graphics card to the system. The card was cheap, came with passive cooling and had a TV out port. The advantages are:

The disadvantages are: After some time of Twonky usage i realized, that some things just can't be done with the remote control only. Therefore kesboard was needed. There are a few remote control keyboard combos out there, but these require some special linux drivers and will not work like a real keyboard. Thus they won't be usable during boot time or e.g. for BIOS setup. I finally found a nice small IR controlled keyboard trackball combo. It's not a high quality thing and the trackball feels really cheap, but for 29 Euros it's a very handy thing for a media PC where you don't write lengthy documents but only need a convenient way to enter a search term or file name every now and then.

2. Assembly

Physical assembly wasn't really difficult, but all those cables needed to be restrained. The LC11M has a bunch of cables other cases do not have. This includes a rather huge power adaptor that fits between the motherboard and its power supply. The purpose of this adapter is to provide access to the standby power supply allowing the front IR receiver to work even if the computer is switched off. With another connection between the front IR receiver and the motherboards main switch connector, the whole computer can thus be switched on using the remote control ... nice feature. I only had minor problems during physical assembly. These were:

3. Software

Twonky was always meant to run Linux. Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was an option, but we didn't get much further than trying to install it and having trouble with the TV replay. Since the first trials with Linux based MythTV went a little faster i never really tried to make Twonky a dual boot machine.

3.1 Choosing a GUI/Distro

There are several Linux and Windows Media Center distributions. Since i was planning to run Twonky under Linux and didn't want to recompile everything from scratch i was searching for something as simple to install as possible. I already had read about projects like MythTV, Freevo and LinVDR. Since i wanted to use analog TV, the DVB focused VDR wasn't a choice. From the screenshots and the documentation MythTV looked nicer and more interesting, so MythTV was my choice.

I didn't find any comfortable packages for Redhat or Suse, but at least some debian packages. So the first tries were done with a standard debian with seperate myth packages. This setup kind of worked, but i had several questions. One of the people i asked about the myth/debian told me about KnoppmMyth. I downloaded the ISO image, burned it onto CD and plenty of things ran out of the box on my test pc (unlike suggested by the name, this is not a live cd system but will be installed onto harddisk). The installation on the real Twonky hardware however wasn't that trivial ...

3.2 Hardware drivers

KnoppMyth booted on Twonky as well, even the drivers and firmware for my PVR-350 card were aready pre-installed, but after a few seconds, the first missing driver became obvious, since the KnoppMyth didn't have a driver for the Marvel Yukon ethernet chip. A driver is available and works nicely under KnoppMyth. With an additional entry alias eth0 sk98lin in the file modprobe.d/aliases the ethernet interface was available direct after boot.

Some other drivers weren't installed by default (dvd dcryptor, lirc remote control driver etc), but they were easily installed using apt-get.

Video io using the PVR-350 worked out of the box. I had a seperate video card installed during installation, since the PVR-350 is no full-featured video card and can't e.g. used for a console during the boot process. There are frame buffer drivers available that allow us to use the PVR-350 just like a video card. At the time i was trying this, these drivers were in a very early stage and didn't support e.g. the XWindow XV extension. Therefore things like DVD playback and Xmame game emulation were running slow and choppy or weren't running at all. So i decided to permanantly keep my GForce MX4000 graphics card in the machine. This card isn't very fast, but it comes with all interesting video output options (DVI, VGA and TV). Getting video out on this card was a matter of minutes and with the Vidias closed source drivers ability to adjust the TV overscan getting a satisfying TV image was quite easy. Furthermore the whole system can now be controlled using the TV (incl. BIOS setup). The PVR-350 is now only being used for video capturing. With the latest XV capable drivers it may very well be possible to run Xine (DVD playback) and Xmame with the PVR-350 in a satisfying way as well.

The only thing still missing was the VFD display. Fortunately there are third party linux drivers available. These drivers integrate nicely into lirc and allow direct access to the VFD display as well as the IR receiver and its remote control. With my additional patches and my .lircrc config file its possible to use the iMon remote control delivered with the LC11 case as a mouse replacement and to control nearly the entire system, especially MythTV. My modified /usr/share/mythtv/themes/blue/ui.xml will give german users a nice colorized EPG guide.

4. Todos and unresolved issues

Some minor things are still not the way i want them to be:
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