Building a hard drive recorder for as close to free as I can manage
Sky+ and Tivo are cool gadgets. I want one, but can't really afford one right now. So I decided to build a hard disc recorder out of old PC hardware I had lying around. The system needs to be able to share the recorded footage for playback on the xbox / other PC's round the house.
The kit: the project centres round a capable video capture card, combined with a TV out graphics card or a ATI All In Wonder video card. The early all in wonder cards are available on Ebay for £15 to £20 quid or you could just blag one off a mate :-). I ended up with a n all in wonder based on the rage chipset. These cards do not work in AGP 8 slots and as suc are cheap. They feature video in and out along with 16mb of ram and a TV tuner. The PC needs to be reasonable, we started with a PII 350 acquired from a business that was throwing them out. This was able to capture video at an acceptable resolution, but was dropping a few frames. The CPU was swapped out and a PIII 450 put in and it runs fine now. The PC came with 96Mb and just needed an extra 32Mb to work well. It came with a 4Gb drive which does for now, until a decent sized hard drive is found / bought. My old AWE64 was used as the sound card as this board actually has an ISA slot. The pc has the usual CD drive, SIS 900 10/100 Nic (£2.50 from ebuyer) and a floppy drive.
Software: This project is running Windows 2000 as its stable and kinder to old hardware than XP. The rest of the software is from ATI and is all free to download and works on the All in wonder. The software allows tv watching, capture and timed record. The software will also encode to a variety of format s on the fly, though which it can do depends on the power of the CPU in the system. I use vcd for general stuff as its quite like vhs and takes up around 500mb an hour. With 3Gb of the drive spare, this gives 6 hours of video which should do for now.
Some research on the net suggests that you could use linux for this as the driver support has evolved nicely and there is good software available for video capture. I plan to have a play with building an equivalent system on linux soon, but for now windows has my vote for ease of use.
In use: All that needs to be done here is to install the Ati software and let it find the TV channels. Then configure the recording options like quality and directory to dump stuff in and you are away. The ATI software is easy to use and seems stable so far. Timer record works ok and the only problem is no integration with sky (yet). Some kind of bodge with a IR port beckons. The machine captures to VCD quality with a 80% cpu usage leaving some spare.
The future: Since this all seems to work and is well useful, an upgrade is planned. Something like a Duron 1800 and a 80gb hard drive should leave me with the ability to record loads of tv and watch it when I like. The better processor should let me capture straight to Xvid with any luck and save more space. Otherwise, video can be captured to avi and then encoded after as the hard drive will have plenty of spare space.