In the last five years, digital video recorders (DVRs) have become all the rage, giving television addicts more and more control over viewing habits. But while TiVo and devices like it (such as the ReplayTV, DishPlayer, DIRECTV Plus, and locally-branded OEM versions of Motorola’s digital cable set-top boxes) have virtually obsoleted the hassle of manually programming and swapping tapes in and out of the VCR, DVRs still have a long way to go to become a centralized media server. Digital nirvana is a single device that combines an Internet-connected PC, the TiVo, an enormous hard disk, and an audio and video streaming server.
But if you’re an early adopter and love to play with PC hardware, you can reach the digital apex now. By mixing Linux, a TV tuner and video capture peripherals, and some nifty open source and commercial software, you can build a home media server that does everything. If TiVo no longer turns you on or you love to play with all kinds of multimedia files, building this box is the project for you.
Acquiring a Video Capture Card
The first thing to buy is a video capture/TV tuner card for the PC that you’re going to designate as your media server. Currently, only one video capture/TV tuner chipset has open source drivers that work — the Conexant CX234xx chipset, which uses the ivtv Linux kernel module available from http://ivtvdriver.org. (The full list of supported hardware can be found…
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