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DVR - Digital Video Recorder 
PVR - Personal Video Recorder

DVR Final Recommendations

Based on what I learned, here are my recommendations.

Hardware Recommendations

Video Card
Pick the right video card for your expected use - just TV, or games too. 
Both ATI and Nvidia make great products.

Capture card. 
For a good, inexpensive choice, check out Hauppauge. Their product works great. 
If you are willing to spend more money, check out ATI’s All-in-Wonder card. It is both a video card and a capture card. In the end, this may be your best choice.

Motherboards. Asus has been recommended to me by friends who build their own PCs. And all the reviews I read during my search back this up.

Disk Drives. There are a lot of choices. SATA drives offer the best performance, which is important when recording or watching programs, so that there is no video hesitation. Get at least 200GB, space will get used quickly.

LAN card. I recommend wireless since the DVR is likely to be used in a place not wired for Ethernet. If you have an Ethernet connection near the DVR, then using the LAN connection built into the motherboard will save you money.

Once you have more than one PC at home, its time to think about a router to provide connectivity for your PCs and DVR. I just got a new Linksys Wireless router, which was very simple to setup.

Soundcard. I am using the soundcard that is built into the PC, so no recommendations for the moment. In the past I used Creative’s SoundBlaster in the past with good results.

Software Recommendations

Media Center Edition operating system. This software is great. It really makes life easy. There is a remote control, so that you can change the channels. And an IR Blaster is also included. It took me five minutes to set up. It will change the channel and record any program for you, automatically. In fact, it also includes a TV guide program, so you can find and record future programs with a simple click.

And if you have any other XP based PCs in the house, they can attach to the DVR and watch the recorded programs across your home network.

There are a lot more great features. Check out Microsoft’s site.

Watching TV remotely, either on your LAN or away from home. You really have two major choices. Sling Media has a device you add to your network called Slingbox. Snapstream’s Beyond TV application with the added Beyond TV Link will allow you to watch TV as well.

Video Editing via Muvee. If you plan on capturing home videos, and you want to take the raw video and make it into a nice show to share on your TV or on a DVD, you really need to get autoProducer from Muvee. It has great reviews. I have not tried it yet, but will soon.

Remote MP3 music access via Slim Devices. If you want to connect to your MP3 collection you can do it with free software from Slim Devices called Slimserver.

Slide Shows. If you are using any version of XP, you can get Photo Story free from Microsoft.

Orb Software A note of caution. As part of my research on building a DVR and adding different capabilities I found a product called Orb that allows you to remotely (from any other PC in world) watch live TV, your recorded programs, listen to your MP3 music and more over the internet, using your DVR as a server. I downloaded and installed this software on my DVR. To see how it worked, I went to another PC on my home network and tried to watch live TV. It did not work. Then I tried to watch a program I had recorded. That did not work either.  So I went back to the DVR to see if it was still working, and found it wasn’t either. My video card driver for watching TV was gone. And shows that I had recorded from premium channels were now blocked. I was not sure what other damage had been done, but that was enough for me.  I used the XP system restore feature to move back to a configuration I had before I had installed Orb. Once the system was restored and had rebooted, everything worked normally, exactly the same as before. No more Orb for me!

If anyone has additional recommendations, send an email to us at
DVR-recommendation@how-to-build-it.com

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