I have several goals for the hardware in giVo:
- It must look good in a living room type environment next to other video and audio components
- It must be able to be controlled remotely
- It must have an LCD of some sort so it can be used without turning on the TV
- It must be quiet enough so it is not noticeable when music or tv is playing low
capture card
The Capture Card I bought is an Asus TV FM capture card. This card supports regular Cable TV inputs. It uses the Philips SAA7134HL chip to tune TV and Cable channels.
The card comes with a nice remote, which means I don’t have to use the wireless keyboard to do simple things like scrolling through menus.
Right now I have regular cable, but in the future I might get digital cable or satellite, in which case I would need to do some more research into cards that support those. If anyone knows of any please send me information about them.
video card
For my video card, I got an ATI with a TV-out. I got an ATI instead of an nVidia because of ATI’s reputation for having better 2D cards. It has performed wonderfully so far.
sound card
For a sound card, I need something that supports optical output to my receiver (to reduce noise on the line between them). I got a card based on the Aureal Vortex 2 chip which is not made any more. This card was very cheap and works great. You can still get them on ebay sometimes.
lcd
I got my LCD from Crystalfontz. They sell all sizes and colors, so I picked out a backlit blue on gray model (model number 634). In retrospect, a non-backlit model might have been easier to read from a distance. This is a serial LCD and is programmable through the serial port.
Recently I have removed the use of the LCD since all the commands can be done using the TV-screen menu.
case
The case I decided on is the AOPEN H400A. This is a miniATX case, which I needed because ATX was too big and microATX was too small. I knew I would need a few slots in the back, and miniATX was the solution. The case is about the size of my stereo receiver, so it turned out well.
hard drive
A quiet hard drive is a must for this kind of system, and my old Maxtor whines really badly, so I did some research. I ended up with a Samsung SP1614N drive, which is a 160gig drive, 7200 RPM, and 8 megabytes of cache. This drive has been extremely quiet.
fans
Another part of the PC that is typically very noisy are the fans. I replaced my P4 CPU fan with a Nexus PHT-3600 fan. This fan is barely audible when the CPU is not in heavy use, and is quiet enough under heavy load. I still have to replace my power supply, because it is now the noisiest part of the system and is audible across the room.
power supply
I recently replaced the power supply that came with the case with a QTechnology Ultra Quiet 350W Power Supply (model QT-02350G). This thing is so quiet I have to put my ear right up to the back of the case to hear it.
keyboard
A remote control may not be flexible enough for certain tasks, especially when you need to type in something for searching. So early on, I bought a wireless keyboard. I don’t remember what brand it is, but the trackball stopped working well after a while so I wouldn’t recommend it. One nifty feature that I have discovered is being able to remotely turn on the computer from the keyboard. Check out the giVo Software section for more information about that.
This is the main page for giVo, my home-grown Personal Video Recorder (PVR) solution.
This all started when I converted my whole CD collection to MP3 and wanted to have an easy-to-use way of accessing my music. I came up with a hardware/software solution I called MusicBox. MusicBox was a client/server based MP3 player, which means that you can control it from any PC. The client supports a seral LCD display, so the menu can show up on the LCD without needing a monitor or TV hooked up.
Once MusicBox was complete enough to be of practical use, I moved on to a PVR to replace my ailing VCR. I didn’t want to pay any monthly fees (and be spied on) by companies like Tivo, so I decided that a PC solution was what I needed. A PC turns out to be much more expandable than a store-bought PVR. Adding more disk space or changing the video card to keep up with latest technologies is easy.
First I needed to find a capture card, the hardware that tunes the TV channels and allows you to record them. I settled on an Asus TV FM card, which had an unbeatable price (at the time), and started searching for software.
There are few options for pay and free software to use. One possibility is Windows Media Center, but there are several problems with it. For one, it is a completely seperate operating system and I wanted to make my software runnable on plain-vanilla Windows. For another, I don’t really trust Microsoft to allow me to listen to non-Windows Media stuff easily in an operating system made specifically for viewing media. Since I am using FLAC for my music and want to be able to chose from the many different codecs for my video, Media Center is not an option.
There are lots of other PVR software packages like MythTV, freevo, myHtpc, ChrisTV, CyberLink VCR and others. However, I’ve tried them all and none of them fit exactly what I want from this project. Some only run on Linux. Some have poor quality recording or took up too much CPU time, slowing my machine to a crawl.
So, finally, I decided to write my own PVR. Take a look at the sections below to see how I did it. Feel free to send me comments, I am always working on this software trying to make it better.
Hardware - This section shows the hardware I used for my giVo
Software - This section contains the software I used and wrote for my giVo
At first I was going to create an install program for the giVo software in case other people wanted to use it. However, creating an install is extra work that I don’t need to do unless someone actually wants it. So, if you want to try this out, let me know. Keep in mind that right now it works but has some quirks, and I will not “officially” support it, although bugs will be fixed and feature requests will be taken into account, but this will be done when I have time, not on a regular schedule. This is free software after all.
Some of the features in the software are: turn off your machine and have it restart to record shows automatically, set shows to record all new episodes only, set shows to record only episodes you have not seen before, play any video media files in your collection, play mp3 songs while showing album covers, easy to use music interface split up by artist and album, set a watch list of shows you want to know about when they appear on the schedule, and much more.
Here are some screenshots. They show the Recording Schedule, Music, Recorded Shows, and TV Schedule screens. These are a little old; the interface has been upgraded to look a bit nicer, but alas who has time to get more screenshots? :)
freevcr
FreeVCR is an open-source video capture program which I use to capture video with my card. It uses the VFW drivers, like VirtualDub does. I modified the source to take command line parameters so I can call it from my main application. This may or may not work with your card. If it does not and you have an alternative, please let me know about it. Make sure you read the ReadMe file for information on how to set up and use this version of FreeVCR.
Download my version of FreeVCR
Download the source code
RemoteABC is a Windows-based app that allows remote access to an ABC Bittorrent client.
ABC (Yet Another Bittorrent Client) is a great download client for Bittorrent files. Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer technology which uses downloaders’ upload capacity to transmit files. Check out the web page for more info.
ABC is the best Windows-based BT client I could find, but I could not find a non-web based application to remotely access it.
Since I don’t want to run a web server on my machine, but I still want remote access to ABC, I wrote a dirty little GUI that does it for me.
I only added the features I needed, so if you want me to add others, just drop me a note on my contact page or on the forums.
Download RemoteABC:
RemoteABC v1.1.8 ( README )
ActiveGcSync is a free utility that synchronizes Google Calendar to a Windows Mobile device. Two-way synchronization is done, and ActiveGcSync supports running in the background and auto-updating the calendars on a schedule.
ActiveGcSync has been tested on Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6. It runs on both Smartphones (no touch screen) and Pocket PCs (with touch screen).
ActiveGcSync includes support for recurring events and exceptions to recurring events. It supports mulitple time zones for all events. As of version 1.2, ActiveGcSync only supports one Google Calendar to be synchronized.
Installation Instructions:
- Download the ActiveGcSync CAB file to your device. You can do this either by transferring it from your PC or downloading it using the internet browser on your device.
- Open up File Explorer on your device and run the CAB file by clicking on it.
- If you get a message about the .NET Compact Framework not being installed, install the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Compact Framework Redistributable
- Once ActiveGcSync is installed, run it from the Programs menu.
Configuring ActiveGcSync:
For more information about configuring ActiveGcSync, check this page.
The ActiveGcSync FAQ contains some more detailed information about the application and how it works.
ActiveGcSync is free and is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Download:
ActiveGcSync v1.2.2 ( README )
Old Versions:
ActiveGcSync v1.1.1
ActiveGcSync v1.1
If you have any bugs or feature suggestions, drop me a line on my contact page or on the forums.
Par-N-Rar is a graphical utility which accepts a directory as input and will repair/verify any PAR/PAR2/SFV/MD5 files in that directory. Once it verifies a set of files, it will attempt to unRAR them. Once it finishes unRARing a RAR archive, it will (optionally) remove the original PAR/RAR files.
For more details about using Par-N-Rar, run the setup and view the help file. For more information on PAR and PAR2 files, see the parchive project. For more information on RAR files, see WinRAR.
Par-N-Rar is open source and is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See theGNU General Public License for more details.
Download
Par-N-Rar v1.3 ( README ) ( source )
Old versions:
Par-N-Rar v1.24
Par-N-Rar v1.23.3
Par-N-Rar v1.22.2
Par-N-Rar v1.21
Par-N-Rar v1.20.3
Par-N-Rar v1.15
Par-N-Rar v1.14
If you have any bugs or feature suggestions, drop me a line on my contact page or on the forums.
