Need help building your own PVR?

The PVR Guides aims to help you set up and get the most out of your home-built PVR, and focuses on MythTV and VDR.

This web site started as a MythTV user group but since then has expanded to cover other PVR programs and setups. The main aim is to make the install / use of PVR programs even easier.

My first PVR was based on MythTV. At this time, the PC under my tv at home was a compaq Evo celeron pc with 512 Meg of Ram, a dvd player, a nvidia graphics card (with tv out) and a bog standard BT848 tv card. The box was loaded with Redhat 9.
I wanted to play with DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) cards and receive digital TV pictures and see what else I could get the box to do. This caused me to move to the VDR program as this supports DVB cards (although I always keep a copy of Myth TV on a spare hard disk). The PC is now running on Gentoo Linux and is running pretty fast as VDR doesn't need X-Windows installed.