Smart Home Blog

If you lucky owner TiVo – digital video recording set-top device for personal television, social person and have yourown blog it might be unteresting for you how to generate TiVoRoll which shows what programs you’ve been recording on your TiVo box. Another possibility is to create RSS Atom showing which episodes of programs your TiVo has been recording lately.

When you create a home network the most important aspect is a concealment of cables. To make your life easier it was invented a way to pass IP traffic over home power lines. If your PC is in the one room and ADSL modem is in another you need to plug a Powerline Adapter near you PC and connect them and another – near ADSL modem and connect them. The end of cable story. You have network connection and good condition your flat or home 🙂

Company Pinnacle offers an intertesting solution to watch digital terrestrial TV – PCTV USB Stick. It’s easily plugin to USB port and comes with mini remote control, rod antenna and TV recording software. So, using PCTV USB Stick you can turn your laptop or PC into a PVR.
Useful features:

• Capture TV or radio shows to your hard disk in MPEG- 1/-2 or DivX format.
• Schedule recordings, or immediately start capturing at the touch of a button.
• Stay informed with ultra-fast Teletext and integrated free EPG.

To get some idea about VDR hardware have a look this forum topic. It’s on German but if you cannot read it (me too :)) you the pictures might tell you all details. This guy did incredible work. Maybe it’d be easier to buy some stock-produced case instead 😉

I talked about possibility to build PVR from PC. So, it’s time to say how to install VDR. It can be done by many ways (sounds like Perl slogan):

1. Traditional method to build from sources. Get latest version from VDR FTP – stable or developer versions depend of your requirements. Here is a good explanation howto install VDR from the sources on Slackware and Mandriva Linux. It can be used for other distributions as well.
2. Build from RPMs. I use Fedora Core that’s way I give you RPM resource for it: Linva.org
3. Use one of existing Linux-based distribution which already contains VDR – LinVDR or arVDR

Personally I installed VDR from RPMs. In my mind it’s the best way if you’d like to have VDR on your PC where is already installed Lunix. it’s easy to update and maintain RPM installed applications IMHO. Also, there are availabe RPMs for several VDR plugins as well in the Linva.org repository. But to install a plugin which doesn’t packaged yet you should have VDR source.