"The Wonders and Horrors of Myth TV" or "How to (and not to) Build Your Own TiVo Box."
I'll keep this entry somewhat short, mostly because there's
just too much to pack into one post, but basically here's the Jist. I
wanted to get TiVo for Sara for christmas, but was stopped by a few
things:
1.) The thing is just too damn expensive. It's OK if you just get the machine, but if you want "service" as well, it's another $15-$20 a month. The lifetime subscription is better, but you have to lay out a few hundred up front for that, and if Tivo folds, you're screwed.
2.) We don't have a landline phone, which is the only way Tivo can download the program guide. (That would be another $33 a month. Suck.)
3.) Although you can hack "DirectTV-Tivo" to work without a phone, it's a pain in the ass, and my landlord won't let me hang a satellite outside the building. Something about if it falls it's his liability. Whatever, he should ban Air Conditioners too then. But I didn't feel like saying that because I like my AC.
So, armed with this batch of problems, I decided just to build the damn thing myself. There's two open source projects with this in mind, http://freevo.sourceforge.net and http://www.mythtv.com.
After a bit of research and playing around, I settled on MythTV simply because you could automatically install all the packages and dependencies using apt. (Meaning, shortly, that I didn't have to do all the hard stuff myself.)
I got that working marginally on my home PC, and then realized that I had hit a snag. The digital cable signal we get can't be decoded by any PC-TV tuner card. The only way I was going to be able to tape the shows that sara loves would be by changing the channels on the Cable box.
I thought this bit was going to be a nightmare which would involve building a remote control emulator which hooked to the PC and then pointing that at the cable box. Amazingly, by some stroke of luck the back of our RCN box had a serial port built in, and I was able to send the commands thought that.
Once I got the TV card bought and installed, I was able to start watching live TV, pause it, and record shows! The program guide was even smarter than Tivo's, and was letting me record a show whenever it was on and doing most of the dirty work for me of figuring out what time and channels it was on. The only tricky part about this was making sure that Sara was out or asleep whenever the program was running, because the cable box changed channels whenever it needed to record.
Once or twice, Sara was like "What the hell! Someone just punched in numbers one the remote. No! Eric, I saw it, one by one the numbers went in! Ahhh! What's going on!?!" And I had to feign ignorance: "Yeah, I know, something's up with this thing, I've got to call the cable company again.."
Now all I had to do was get myself a little low-powered mini pc like the ones at http://www.mini-itx.com and I'd have the perfect present. Something that I'd worked on, and that Sara would use every day. Sure, it was a bit geeky, but at the same time, you can't go wrong putting a bunch of time and effort into a present.
Coming next post - "The neverending saga of that F8%$)@! Mini-PC" or "Why Not Sleeping Makes You Legally Insane"
