Divx Resource Site

TiVo is a great idea. It let's you record tv shows like a vcr, but instead of vhs tapes, it stores onto a hard drive. The unit runs about $200 and then you subscribe for $10 per month. So you get something like 30 hours of recording of just the tv shows you want to watch. The unit is basically a computer. I figured with all the stuff out today for home computers, I could build these functions and not pay the monthly subscription fee. Here is a list of things I did to get this idea to work. I know many of you probably could figure this stuff out on your own. I just wanted to share what worked for me.

Here's what I started with.

• Pentium III, 733mhz on Apollo Pro Motherboard with 512meg 133mhz sdram.
• Sony 8x CDRW, 80gig Western Digital Hard Drive, 32meg ATI Rage Pro video.
• Windows 2000 Professional

By today's standards, this is a slow computer. I've had this box for about 3 years, but, hey it still works. You could buy a system about twice as fast as this one for like $300 now. Amazing.

Here's what I bought.

ATI TV Wonder VE. $39 with $10 mail in rebate.

I just installed the card and loaded the software. I have basic comcast cable and plugged the cable into the card. I don't think digital cable works, since the tuner takes analog signals.

It comes with GUIDE+ which downloads listings in your area. You can then sort the listings by show name, channel, and times.

I love just putting in the first few letters of my favorite program and GUIDE+ lists all the times and channels that show is showing. Type in "Raymond" and one of my favorite shows "Everybody Loves Raymond" is displayed.

I click on the middle icon next to each episode I want to record. Highlighting the show gives you an episode synopsis and who's starring in it. Really COOL!

The shows get recorded to your hard drive and listed in a library. When I get home, I just click on "Library" and it shows me all the shows it recorded.

Now I can either watch these on my computer or copy them to cd and play on my dvd player! The record quality is a little better than vhs. Here's a sample.

CSPAN.MPG

Recorded at 480x240. When you copy this to your CDRW, it plays on your dvd player on your TV! I know it looks stretched out on the windows media player, but when it plays on your tv, it's normal. Believe it or not, the quality is definately better than vhs. I could record at 352x240 so it plays on windows media player without looking stretched out, but I wanted the higher quality for tv playback.

There are even higher quality settings, but it's just a waste of hard disk space. The quality really didn't improve that much. I think this is mostly because the standard tv signal is not all that good anyway. A 30 minute program takes about 650 meg. at this setting. The higher quality settings use about 1.7gig for 30 minutes.

So that's it! For around $40, I built a TiVo equivalent. I burn everything to re-writable CDRW which cost about 50cents each. Eventually, I'll make labels and burn them to CD-R's which cost less than 20 cents each. I want to collect the entire season of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and make my own season box sets! Applying simple math, 100 episodes will cost me about $20. Using some DivX software, I could cut that cost in half by putting 3 or 4 episodes per disc. I'll update this page when I do that.

If you have any questions or ideas, please share them in the message board. Hope this page was helpful.

Thanks.

-Rob