Smart Home Blog

If you’d like to have personal video recorder (PVR) but wouldn’t to buy an expensive one or build it by yourself the new Conceptronic Grab’n’GO Multimedia Recorder & Player is probably what do you really need. Thanks to built-in storage and integrated analog TV tuner the device allows to record TV shows, pause LiveTV, create a recording schedule. Additionally, it can record video from DVD player, set-top box or camcorder.

It’s planing that Grab’n’GO Multimedia Recorder & Player will be shipped with HDD in 500Gb which should be enough to store more than 228 hours in high quality video and more than 656 hours in low quality. It also acan be connected to the PC via USB to copy media content (XviD, AVI, MPEG 1/2/4,JPEG, MP3, WAV and VOB are supported) from/to device.

The CM3PVR is now available, with a retail price starting from € 269,- incl. VAT (500GB).

[via eHomeUpgrade]

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Recently I wrote about adding X10 automation functionality into MythTV interface. Now I’d like to introduce a way to integrate a modern wireless technology Z-Wave in your MythTV box. It’s called HACKmyth. It isn’t free: the basic unit costs $799 and extended version - $999. But you’ll able to control your lighting system and PVR from one user interface and using only one remote control of course.

I’d like to tell any bad words about HACKmyth. moreover, is good that Linux software is used in production systems. But IMHO it’d be better to buy FiireEngine with configured LinuxMCE which supports Z-Wave, X10, INSTEON (soon), includes MythTV, VDR, Asterisk and covers all areas of home for $799. In that case you’ll able to control almost all devices in your house.

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Here is a free service offered Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for media centers which based on Video Disk Recorder (VDR). Its interface is available in three languages: English, German and Russian. Just register a new account and follow by instruction to setup it in your VDR.

As I already mentioned the service is free but it has a small limitations. There is a possibility to take VIP account but it isn’t clear how to do it (it isn’t sold for money). But I suspect that free options should be quite enough.

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If you’re owner of HTPC with Video Disk Recorder (VDR) and have enough interesting recorded media content you might use vdrtube to share it similar way as it’s done with YouTube. That VDR plug-in adopt video to display in Flash-player and build HTML structure to access it via web browser.

Plug-in allows to create themes. So, you can customize YourTube according to your desire. Also, there is a possibility to control access to your media content using Apache authorization functionality. Plug-in vdrtube is developed on Perl. It’ll be pretty easy to modify it if you don’t satisfy its work.

Actually, it’s a good possibility to share your video between relatives or friends. But personally I prefer to have plug-in which allows to watch YouTube video on TV using VDR or MythTV. But currently as I know only Windows MCE offers such feature.

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LegendTV is one of the Google Summer projects. Its goal is to create an alternative to MythTV for Linux-based machines. LegendTV has an architecture similar to MythTV - apparent separating to a front-end and a back-end. The front-end will handle playback via a Java3D-based GUI. The back-end will offer similar functionality as many existing PVRs: scheduling, recording, file management etc. Currently the project author concentrates on Linux version. But following by Java slogan “Written once, works everywhere” or something similar, versions for Windows and MacOs are also planned.

I can be wrong but IMHO Java technologies are too heavy and resource-intensive for home using. I don’t think that the LegendTV can be work efficiently on Pentium II with 256Mb RAM as VDR can. Anyway, let see how that project will grow. Basically, it’s good to have reasonable number of choices to build home media center.

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