This is the first in a series of posts about choosing the right bits to build a Personal Video Recorder. A couple weeks back I decided that neither PlayTV nor TiVo really suited my needs, so I will be building my own.
It’s been a while since I looked at computer components, and the market has changed dramatically. Nowhere is this more evident than the CPUs. Originally, I had flagged a dual-core desktop chip like the Intel CoreDuo or an AMD Athlon II. However, there’s a new entrant to the CPU space: the Intel Atom that is at the heart of a lot of lightweight applications like netbooks, mobile phones, and media players.
The Atom looks like a possible choice, since it draws less power and generates less heat than traditional CPUs. This is good, since less heat means less fans, and you want to minimise noise in your home theatre.
There’s always tradeoffs, however, so it’s probably best to list out what I want this machine to do:
- It has to be able to handle simultaneous recording and playback of Digital TV signals. Since this mostly handled by the tuner card itself, and there are pre-made Atom-based PVR machines that handle this, I’m not to worried on this score.
- Transcoding of recorded files to save space, should we choose to keep something after watching it.
I’m not too worried about simultaneous playback. Dual-tuner cards handle most of the heavy lifting in that task, and there are pre-made Atom-based PVR machines that seem to be able to do the work.
Tom’s Hardware actually has a detailed article on the second point. Looks like a good desktop-grade CPU is twice as fast at media transcoding tasks. This could be a dealbreaker. Still, if the price is right, then I might be ok to take the performance hit.
Anyone out there made this decision recently?
2 replies on “PVR: Choosing a CPU”
I think you might want to take a look at the Ion machines. I use it under Linux, but apparently Windows 7 has GPGPU-based transcoding, which it looks like what you want.
I’m not too familiar with DTV, but if you’re receiving OTA streams it shouldn’t be too hard to use a USB receiver for that. There are probably solutions available for cable as well.
@Sean: Your post about using an Ion-based nettop actually got my thinking about this post. Ion may be the way to go, but I will probably be using Linux since I don’t want to fork out for an OS where I won’t be using 90% of the features.
I’ll be hunting for DTV tuners next. There are some pretty nice PCI cards, which helps to make the box self-contained, but I’m not totally opposed to USB sticks yet.