Need whole house DVR system build / component advise

I want to build as close to a whole house DVR system as I can. Record multiple shows and view on all TVs.

I already have a Linux box running MediaTomb that serves movies pretty well. To view the movies, I have a networked Blueray player at one TV and a popcorn hour A100 at another TV. This works great.

I have a couple of other TVs that I would like to add to the system but more importantly, I want to add TV tuners to my linux box and add disk space to handle all the recording. I know I will probably need to rent a cable card from Time Warner but that seems much less expensive than renting the whole house DVR capability plus the three other cable boxes necessary to view the recorded shows.

I am looking for suggestions for client players as well as tuner cards and any guidance or lessons learned.

I do not have HTPC connected to any of my TVs. I know I am old school, I just haven't needed them. I don't mind building / adding one if I really needed but I don't want to build one for each TV.

Are there any good ways to allow remote programming of the TV tuner, ideally from each TV or even Iphone / ipad / android app?


Thanks in advance.

Buy a bunch of TiVos. They can copy back and forth to each other, and the newer ones can stream as well. You can use pyTivo to stream the movies from your linux box to the tivos. This is not the cheapest option, but it may be the easiest for everyione involved.

Another option with a little twist. Rather than recording the shows, use a combination of sickbeard and sabnzbd to download them automatically from usenet. Add in couchpotato if you want to do movies too. Combined with a cheap subscription to newzbin2.es and/or nzbmatrix, this takes out a lot of the hassle. Then you can use some cheap WDTVs or something similar for playback - I use a combination of sabnzbd, sickbeard (couchpotato for movies), pyTivo, ushare (where you use mediatomb) and for playback, tivos, MacMinis with Plex and an Asus O!Play (not so great but it does work).

Would having a lag of a few hours between the show airing on the east coast and having it available without commercials be worth it? If so this backend setup (sab/sb) might be an option for you,

I have looked at the TIVO option but without the lifetime subscription or at least a resonable one for used systems, It is cheaper to buy the service from time warner.

I have some old replay tv systems with the lifetime service that were great, just a little limited and probably being phased out.

I am not familiar with sickbeard and sabnzbd but I will take a look at them.

I still want to be able to record from live tv since there are HBO / showtime movies that I would like to record / playback at my convenience.

Quote from glsvb : I have looked at the TIVO option but without the lifetime subscription or at least a resonable one for used systems, It is cheaper to buy the service from time warner. I have some old replay tv systems with the lifetime service that were great, just a little limited and probably being phased out. I am not familiar with sickbeard and sabnzbd but I will take a look at them. I still want to be able to record from live tv since there are HBO / showtime movies that I would like to record / playback at my convenience.

I think the point wmelnick is making with the newsgroups & downloaders is to let others record them (and post-process them, ie remove commercials) so you don't have to. However, doing so usually violates copyright/filesharing laws, so if you don't want to worry about that, you need something different.

The thing that first comes to my mind is using your linux box as a DLNA server. You may want to check out http://www.tvmobili.com/. I've never used it so I can't vouch, but it does have a free month trial and then is 1.50/month if you stream over 10GB of content monthly. I'm not sure if this'll let you stream to your popcorn hour. Serviio [serviio.org] is another option.

In theory, you should be able to run MythTV on your box, record TV, and stream it to whatever DLNA client you want, so you could just buy some more media players/blu ray players. However, the big caveat is this: AFAIK, Windows 7 is the only OS that is cablecard certified. So if you want HD "cable" (ie not ABC/CBS/...) channels, you'll need to change over. I suggest you do this -- W7 is an awesome HTPC/DVR OS. You could use a combination of DLNA and xbox 360 extenders in order to serve media to other TVs.

Or get Hulu Plus & then you can use their 4,588T dvr & watch from any room. ;-)

Quote from handyguy : Or get Hulu Plus & then you can use their 4,588T dvr & watch from any room. ;-)

Useful, but they might not have every show OP wants. Def something to check out, though (along with netflix).

Quote from bonkman : Useful, but they might not have every show OP wants. Def something to check out, though (along with netflix).

and amazon prime's video service.

Thanks for the suggestions but I am trying to keep this legal so downloading from torrents or newsgroups isn't my first choice.

I have looked at Hulu and it has some of the shows we like but there are enough other shows that we want to keep the cable and use some sort of multi-tuner capture.

Right now, I am looking at HDHomeRun PRIME since it is an external device, it looks like it will work with MythTV and Linux. I don't really care about the OS much but free is free. I have windows xp and windows 7 systems but not an extra one that I can dedicate to this. I do have older linux HW that runs media tomb pretty well. The systems are too old / weak to provide on-the-fly video decoding but they can serve h264 OK.

From what I can find, HDHomeRun will work with MythTV but there are some limitations and can only record "copy freely" shows. I am not sure what this means exactly, but I may have to try setting it up and experimenting.

Any comments?

Thanks again