Many years ago I was jealous of my friends that had a TiVo. Since I live out on a farm and get my television the old fashioned way via an antenna, TiVo didn’t work for me. I was stuck with using a VCR to record my television programs.

UPDATE: My friend Tanner pointed out that TiVo does offer an Over the Air (OTA) option now. It runs $49.99 for the hardware plus a monthly charge of $14.99 (a “lifetime” option is available as well). Looks pretty cool and I’m sure it is easier to set up than what I did. If I wasn’t all about open source I would have seriously considered this.

Then I got introduced to a product called EyeTV. This is a product designed for OS X that looks like an old school USB stick with a coax connector at one end. Connect that to your antenna, plug the USB end into your Mac, install the software and, voilà, you have your own personal video recorder (PVR). The hardware is actually a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-980 but the secret sauce is the software to make it easy to use.

Note: it appears they don’t make that unit for the US anymore and instead sell an external unit.

The EyeTV setup works fine, but as I’ve moved away from Apple products I have been wanting to replace it with an open source PVR. There are a number of open source media suites, including Kodi (previously XBMC) and MythTV, and I’ll cover that in my second post. I decided to explore OpenElec, which is a lightweight packaging of Kodi, and since I could not find an “all in one” guide for setting something like this up, I wanted to document the process I went through in the hope that it will help someone else.

The first challenge was finding suitable hardware. I run EyeTV on a Mac Mini. It’s small and quiet and has enough horsepower to drive the EyeTV software at HD resolutions. But, it is a full operating system and has some frustrating issues. First, I use Front Row, which Apple dropped with OS X Lion. Next, it is connected to a UPS and when the power blips (which happens frequently on the farm) I get a little pop up on the screen that requires you to click “ok”, and that can’t be disabled. Almost every time I go to watch a program I have to dig out a wireless mouse just so I can acknowledge the dialog box. I wanted something that could be run entirely by remote and was as lightweight as possible.

Noise from the unit was a big consideration for me. If you want to do a lot of video processing you need a rather powerful machine, but those tend to need cooling and cooling means noise. To deal with this, most PVR software comes with the concept of a “frontend” or playback client that talks to a “backend” that actually acquires and manipulates the video stream. A lot of people have had success in using a Raspberry Pi as the frontend, but I wanted a unit that was both powerful enough to act as both the frontend and backend while not generating much noise.

Yeah, I know, first world problem.

The first unit I tried was the Z3RO Pro from Xi3. My friend Donnie works at WDL Systems and they specialize in embedded devices, so he tends to be pretty up to date on the latest new shiny and recommended I check it out. I ordered one from Amazon preconfigured with an SSD hard drive and 4GB of RAM.

It’s a very stylish and compact unit, and the one I bought came preloaded with SuSE Linux. It did have noticeable fan noise, however. Nothing too obnoxious, but in my quiet office I could definitely hear it.

That wasn’t a show stopper, but what did kill it for me was the fact that I couldn’t get it to talk to any of my HDMI devices. The Z3RO Pro comes with two video ports, one for DisplayPort and a combo DP/HDMI connection. You have to be very careful when putting an HDMI plug into that port as there is nothing to really guide the orientation (you put it in upside down) and if you force it in the wrong way you can damage it. I didn’t have a HDMI cable at the office, so I used an HDMI to DVI one and it worked fine, but when I got home the unit wouldn’t recognize the monitor with a straight HDMI cable. I tried three different cables and three different monitors and not even the boot screen would show up, so I had to return the unit. There is no audio out on the Z3RO Pro outside of HDMI and audio is a big part of this experiment.

The next unit I tried was the Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing). This looks like a taller, smaller version of the original Mac Mini. It comes as a kit and you have to add your own storage and memory. Since my current setup has a 350GB HDD, I opted for a 512GB SSD and 8GB of Crucial RAM. The NUC also requires a mini-HDMI connection, so I bought a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable as well.

When the unit arrived, there was a cute little Easter Egg upon opening the box:

In addition to the computer hardware, I had to obtain a compatible TV tuner and a remote.

For the tuner I went with a Kworld UB435-Q, which is supported by OpenElec, and an Ortek VRC-1100 for the remote control. I didn’t really care about the remote itself as I have a Harmony 900 universal remote and my plan was to use it, but I needed an IR receiver and the Ortek was cheap.

I did manage to get this setup working well with OpenElec, but it wasn’t easy and I’ll cover the details in the next post. One funny thing I found was when I was programming the Harmony it appears that the NUC includes an IR receiver so the Ortek is unnecessary. You might be able to understand my confusion when the remote was working but the little red LED in the Ortek receiver wasn’t blinking. I ended up unplugging it and when I could still manipulate OpenElec I concluded that the NUC must have it. During this process, however, I ended up blanking my Harmony and I had to reconfigure everything, and at some point the NUC’s IR stopped working. Since I got it working with the Ortek’s receiver and I’m not in any need of extra USB ports, I kept it.

The cost of this experiment so far:

Intel NUC BOXD54250WYKH1	$351.00
Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5″ SSD	$213.99
Crucial 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR3 1600	$66.99
Kworld UB435-Q USB ATSC TV Tuner	$24.99
Ortek Windows 7 Vista XP Media Center MCE PC Remote Control	$16.96
AmazonBasics High-Speed A to C Type, HDMI to Mini-HDMI Cable	$6.99
Total:	$680.92

You can shave $100 to $150 off of that price by using a smaller SSD. The Intel NUC I bought also supports laptop-size HDDs, but if you plan to use an SSD and just want a smaller unit, there is an SSD-only version of the NUC that is a little smaller and a couple of dollars cheaper.

This is much more expensive than a lot of media players out there, and the main cost has to do with my requirement to capture live over-the-air digital television. For many people, this is an archaic concept (I was talking about this in the office and Ben jokingly asked “What’s a channel?”) and thus of limited value, but for those of us still using the old paradigm a PVR like this is useful.

Finally, while my NUC is based on Intel’s Haswell chip, they just announced that the Broadwell-based units will ship soon. In an ironic twist, they are being manufactured via a partnership with Xi3. As soon as that happens, you can expect the price of my unit to drop, so if you are considering a project like this, you have options.

And that’s what open source is all about to me: options.