In this book I'll describe and document my expierences with building a PVR, a Personal Video Recorder. A PVR is something like a harddisk meeting your videorecorder combined with TV. This gives you great new opertunities, such as

• Timeshifting (pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television)
• Record more than one program at a time or watch TV and record another channel
• Download program scheduling times ("TV Guides") and program what you want to record
• And much ... much more

There are several hard and software component and solutions for this. If you want no hussle and dont mind about proprietary software and standards, money and vendor locking, buy yourself a mediacentre from Microsoft. It fits your needs.

If you do care about how to watch what, want an open infrastructure that is future proof and you have some spare time (lots of it!) and can manage a Linux box, pick MythTV. It is an OpenSource PVR with a very active community, an open infrastructure and lots of features.

For example, watching TV ("frontend") and recording TV "backend" can be seperated on different machines and you can even have multiple frontends and backends. It also comes packed with additional features like:

• MythGallery, a picture-viewing application
• MythVideo, a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV
• MythDVD, a DVD viewer / ripper
• MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC
• MythGame, play "old" console games on your TV in an emulator
• MythWeather, display weather conditions in your region
• MythNews, a RSS news grabber
• MythBrowser, a web browser
• MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser.
• MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP.

In this book, I'll descibe my adventures building my PVR. You might help me or might learn from me. Share what you know, learn what you dont.

Note that not all my PVR related postings will end up here, but all of the PVR related blog entries can be found with the taxonomy term PVR.