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<\/center><\/p>\nThis is the main page for giVo, my home-grown Personal Video Recorder (PVR) solution.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> for my music and want to be able to chose from the many different codecs for my video, Media Center is not an option.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Hardware<\/a> – This section shows the hardware I used for my giVo<\/p>\n