A couple of weeks ago I decided that paying $60 a month was too much for cable when all I was watching were sports and prime time shows like Desperate Housewives, 24, Lost, Alias, etc. (Please don't tell anyone that I watch Desparate Housewives.) So I figured that I'd make the switch back to an "old school" antenna setup and save myself about $700 per year.

But, what I was really going to miss were two things--my TiVo (which was provided by my cable company) and OnDemand movies. TiVo (as most anyone who tried it would say) is freakin' awesome and if I am only going to have 5 channels of TV, I want to be able to pick and choose what I want to watch. For OnDemand, I might pick-up a NetFlix account as see what that's all about.

So this major life decision prompted me to dig out some old computer parts (in this case an Athlon 2100+ CPU and motherboard and an full height rack mount server case) and start building a PVR.

After trying MythTV and Freevo (both Linux) I settled on GB-PVR because it would run on Windows 2000 (which I had lying around as well) and I hoped I'd be able to run a few other things on that box to make it more of a video/audio/data server.

So, over the next few posts, I'll chronicle my experiences with the software/hardware and wrap the whole thing up in one big review.

Next time, the hardware.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 02, 2005 at 9:31 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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