pvr minus the r

January 11, 2006 5:06 PM

I've got a beater computer that I want to use to stream media to my tv (it's a 1.2 ghz P3). What do I need at the bare minimum (hardware/software) to get AVIs to my tv and feel like I'm watching cable instead of a computer file? Remember, I am looking for the simplest soultion.

The networking part I'm okay with. But I don't know more exotic computer hardware. Is there, like, a PCI card with RCA out and then I can just watch stuff from zoom player at full screen and it will look good? Like that kind of stuff.

posted by Mayor Curley to media & arts (12 comments total)

If you get one of the ATI Radeon all-for-wonders I think they have RCA out. At least the one I have does.
posted by unSane at 5:10 PM on January 11, 2006

One of the simplest (though not the legal-est...) would be to get a modded xbox and use xbox media center. i've seen several and with a well encoded divx it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between it and DVD.

i have no idea where you would go about getting one though.
posted by quin at 5:16 PM on January 11, 2006

i think you have the concept right but i'll be interested in hearing more. You might want to peruse my question's thread (pretty much the same thing). Some good stuff...

to be honest, my simplest solution which may or may not work for you was to by the phillips DVP642 dvd player at target for 45-50 bucks then just burn all my downloads to CDr or DVDr. Works like a charm.
posted by freudianslipper at 5:16 PM on January 11, 2006

You might consider getting something like an AVeL Linkplayer. It's a networked DVD player that can see onto your home network and play most any file, audio or video.

At $250, it's not cheap, but it absolutely the simplest method to use where you will feel that you are 'watching cable instead of a computer file'.
posted by Argyle at 5:42 PM on January 11, 2006

A lot of modern video cards have an s-video output - this should just plug directly into your TV with an s-video -> s-video cable. If the current card doesn't have s-video, you can pick up a new one for about £25. And yes, basically anything displayed on the PC will appear on your TV. Zoom player is one option, though there are a bunch of media centre front-ends which will make the experience slicker.

Or go the linux route and install MythTV - it will fly on your older hardware compared to Windows.
posted by blag at 6:03 PM on January 11, 2006

It sounds to me like you want to make this extra computer into a Home Theatre PC, a lot of the responses so far don't agree though (I think that is because you use the word 'stream' which you probably don't mean).

You just need a video card with TV Out. The very oldest video cards with TV Out might be a little slow when playing back the latest HDTV Xvid downloads and might have limited colour reproduction ability. The particular old card I'm thinking of is an All-in-Wonder 128 which worked but wasn't too wonderful, anything newer should be fine.

While you don't need an All-in-Wonder, because you didn't ask for the R part, All-in-Wonder 9600s and 9800s are very cheap for what you get right now ($130-160 CAD) and either will with a RF remote. Depending on what the computer you have has built in, I might also get a good sound card. My answer to a recent question about audio is just about applicable actually - from Computer to Stereo.
posted by Chuckles at 6:19 PM on January 11, 2006

either will come bundled with an RF remote.
posted by Chuckles at 6:20 PM on January 11, 2006

I'll second the whole XBox route. You can even do something called "softmodding" where you don't have to crack open the XBox to mod it.

Once you get the XBox moded, it's a simple process to install and setup XBox Media Center (XBMC) which an play video files over SMB or from the local hard drive or DVD drive.
posted by mge at 6:27 PM on January 11, 2006

A friend and I have done this with (don't laugh) an old Dell Optiplex GX100 with a 500MHz Celeron processor, a slow-as-molasses hard drive, and 128MB of RAM. Added hardware was limited to an nVIDIA GeForce 4 64MB PCI graphics card with s-video out and a Firewire/USB hub PCI card for connecting to external drives.

We used a PCI graphics card only because this box had integrated graphics and no AGP slot. Most modern-ish systems will have a graphics card in an AGP slot. If this system's graphics card does not have TV-out in the form of RCA or s-video (the latter being a roundish connector resembling the old PS/2 plugs used for mice and keyboards before USB came along) then you'll want to invest in a new graphics card. It doesn't have to be new and expensive; we picked ours up on eBay somewhere in the $30 to $40 range, if I remember correctly. You'll need a graphics card with TV-out whether you use Linux or Windows, and if your old card doesn't have it then you should replace it with a new one rather than trying to add a graphics card (having a second graphics card would be kind of pointless in this situation). Also, assuming your old graphics card fits an AGP slot (probably true) your new one should do the the same. You can recognize an AGP slot by the following: it's different from your PCI slots, and your graphics card is in it. ;-)

Note that if your graphics card has s-video out but your equipment has RCA in, that's okay. You can buy an adapter. Also, if it seems like s-video and RCA cables are really expensive (they are in most places) then you should shop around until you find someplace they aren't.

Now what you do from here will depend on whether you want to use Windows or Linux. The nice thing about Linux is you won't have to buy any software, and for a system as crappy as the one we were working with, it's the only thing that you'll be able to get to do what you need on such limited hardware. Your system is a bit beefier, so you have some flexibility. Using Linux may require some tweaking, though, and if you have no prior Linux experience it's likely to prove frustrating.

We used Ubuntu Linux because it's easy to set up and configure and things tend to "just work" more than on many other distributions. It's not the most "lightweight" distribution we could have chosen, but ease of use was worth sacrificing a tiny bit of that blazing Celeron speed.

The process went something like this:

1. Install Ubuntu.

2. Switch from the integrated graphics to the PCI graphics card. Your system probably doesn't have integrated graphics, in which case this step wouldn't be necessary. This was done by [a] "lspci" to find the PCI address of the new graphics card [b] back up the X11 configuration file ("sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup") [c] change /etc/X11/xorg.conf to reflect the correct PCI address

3. install the nvidia-glx package and use "sudo nvidia-glx-config enable" to turn on 3D acceleration (actually, since we'd manually edited the X11 configuration file, this command wouldn't work, so we accomplished the same thing by going back into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and changing the driver from "nv" to "nvidia")

4. compile the latest version of mplayer from cvs, a good media playing software. MythTV can be configured to use mplayer as the actual media player. You may not have to use the CVS version of mplayer, depending on what video formats you want to play, but if you really want a "Swiss Army knife" of format compatibility, you'll need to. Follow this HOWTO to compile mplayer on ubuntu without confusing your package manager. Note that for full format support you'll need the w32codecs (or the "essential codecs pack" available for download from the mplayer web site). The legality of employing these options varies by where in the world you live, so determining what the laws are in your country is left up to you. Of similarly variable legality is libdvdcss2, which will allow you to play encrypted DVDs. If you choose to install it, you may do so by installing libdvdread3 and then issuing the "sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh" command. At this point, the computer is capable of playing full-screen video on a televison. But for added spiffiness and features:

5. Install MythTV, a PVR-and-general-media-spiffiness program for Linux. Note that if you want your PC to serve as a PVR, you'll need a graphics card with TV tuner/capture ability or a separate TV tuner/capture card. I can't comment on the MythTV installation process because my friend did it at home over winter break.

6. Install some sort of infrared dongle for remote control and use lirc to manage it. We haven't done this yet.

The little box is able to play almost anything we throw at it. Occasionally it falls a little behind on XviD and drops a few frames or loses A/V sync for a minute, but it does very well for its crappiness. The only exception is H.264 video, which requires several times as much computing power to decode as pretty much any other codec.

Note that we're both relatively new to Linux; I've been dabbling in it for a little over a year and using it as my primary operating system for only a few months, and my friend has significantly less experience. So you don't have to be a guru to set up something like this, but it helps if you have some basic experience under your belt.

If you decide to make a Windows-based media box, I wish you the best of luck, but I've got little personal experience in that area to share. Assuming you don't want any frills, it should be as simple as getting a graphics card with TV-out, turning on the s-video out, and playing your files fullscreen on that display in Windows Media Player, VLC, the Windows version of mplayer, or whatever makes you happy.

Others above have suggested some dedicated-appliance approaches such as using an XBox which could be good if you're willing to spend a little money. However, I thought I'd take a stab at helping answer your original question.
posted by musicinmybrain at 8:32 PM on January 11, 2006

I've done this with a 500 Mhz celeron and a lot of hard drives. My solution is based around a standalone box you can get for about $70 that takes VGA in one side and spits out svideo or rca on the other. The nice thing about this is that it's completely portable from one computer to the next, no drivers required, works on all operating systems, etc.

I use linux because it was easiest in this case. I use a simple menuing system (that I wrote) and all the media gets played through MPlayer, which plays everything, well. You don't need much in the way of video but it needs to support XV or OpenGL to get decent full-screen video (at least, with a processor as crappy as mine. Yours may be fine).

If you feel like it it's pretty easy to add video game capabilities (mame, NES and sNES emulators, etc). I also added the ability to play music.

The other thing I did that adds a veneer of quality to it is use a good sound card with digital out.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:58 PM on January 11, 2006

What blag and Chuckles said.

Nearly any video card you can find has an s-video out, and you can get an s-video to composite/rca adapter if needed.Alternately you can use a VGA to s-video/rca adapter.
posted by Pryde at 9:09 PM on January 11, 2006

Just a note, but buying an xbox, modding it and installing xbox media center breaks no laws. You only get on the laws bad side when you use it to watch, or play things you've downloaded, or otherwise haven't legally obtained.

But that's not the best solution for you, I'd say that the video card with RCA out is the best solution.
posted by jcruden at 5:49 AM on January 12, 2006