Godzilla PVR
January 18th, 2006 at 8:20 pm by Percy
The King of all Monster PVRs
Powered by SnapStream Beyond TV 4
Introduction:
With the third installment of our Monster PVR series, we here at SnapStream asked ourselves, “How can we beat the Medusa PVR, our 6 tuner beast, and our Hydra PVR, our 10 tuner monster?”
Why, by making an 11 tuner system with HDTV support, of course! This is when the Godzilla PVR system, king of all monsters was born. How do we top the Hydra PVR? This system is an ultra high end HTPC showcasing Beyond TV 4 and capable of recording 11 shows, 4 high definition and 7 standard definition, at once. With Beyond TV 4’s HDTV support and with its unlimited tuners, you can create your own monster system.
(Interested in using SnapStream at your company or organization? Learn more about SnapStream’s turnkey enterprise TV solutions. http://www.snapstream.com/enterprise)
The Guts of Godzilla:
All in all, it takes a lot of hardware to build a Godzilla PVR. Here’s everything that went into our machine:
Case
Godzilla’s Silvertone LC16M Case
The first step in building a new HTPC is figuring out what it is going to look like. I wanted Godzilla to feel at home among it’s home theater brethren. I choose the Silverstone LC16M. This case supports a fullsized ATX motherboad and had room for 6 internal 3.5″ drives and one DVD±R/RW drive. I knew I wanted to install at least a terrabyte of space in this case so that was a major selling point. Other advantages of this case are it’s LCD screen and front mounted multimedia keys. There’s even a knob that makes it look more like a home theater component.
The Silverstone LC16M’s LCD isn’t actually a Liquid Crystal Display, it’s a 2 line x 16 character Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD). These VFDs are usually used in home theater components because it lacks the need for a backlight like the ones required by LCDs. It’s connected via an internal USB header via an adapter that ships with the case. If you don’t have an internal USB header available you can connect it to a spare USB port on the back of your PC. Beyond TV 4 doesn’t support LCD displays natively but there is 3rd party support available thanks to the Beyond TV’s Developer SDK and some devoted Beyond TV users.
All that is needed to get this display to work is LCDSmartie, the iMon LCDSmartie Plugin, and the LCDSmartie Plugin for BTV.
Hard Drives
Six Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives went into Godzilla
With HDTV support in Beyond TV 4 we wanted to record as much HD content as we could. Since the price of 250 GB hard drives have dropped recently we choose to install four Seagate 250GB SATA drives for storing our BTV recordings and two Seagate 160GB SATA drives for the OS and other applications. We configured the four 250GB drives as RAID 0 (striping) and formatted them with NTFS and 64k blocks to increase the disk size and performance. With one terrabyte of space allocated as our recording drive we are able to record 112 hours of HD material or 424 hours of standard definition material at Better quality. If we ever started to run low we could always ShowSqueeze to Windows Media or the DivX format.
With six hard drives in this case we ran into an issue: heat! Heat is the biggest enemy when building a quiet HTPC system. You have to sometimes sacrifice a quiet HTPC so the machine can cool itself efficiently. One of the best design elements of this case is the ability to add 92mm fans to the each of it’s two hard drive cages. This allows the system to suck air in from vents under the case and blow it over the hard drives. This is then exhausted through the power supply on one side and the dual 80mm fans on the other.
The fan used to dissipate heat from the hard drive.
CPU
When choosing the processor to go in Godzilla we thought to ourselves, “What CPU should we choose to power the ‘King of all Monster PVRs’?” We choose the Intel Pentium D 840 “Extreme Edition” Processor! What could be beating in the belly of a beast like Godzilla but the best processor Intel makes? Intel introduced the Pentium D line of processors in the Spring of 2005 which consists of two Pentium 4 Prescott dies in a single package which creates a dual core processor. This allows one processor to behave as two processors physically in one package. This obviously has an advantage as opposed to a single core design.
What makes the “Extreme Edition” processor different from a regular Pentium D processor? A regular Pentium D processor has two cores which Windows XP sees as two physical processors. The Extreme Edition processors adds hyper-threading to each core! This allow Windows XP to run 4 simultaneous threads at once! It’s the equivalent of having two hyper-threaded processors in one computer. Beyond TV 4 is on the cutting edge by adding Core Detection.
If Beyond TV 4 detects additional cores, it allows for running simultaneous ShowSqueeze and SmartChapter jobs. You are allowed to run an additional job for each additional core detected. Beyond TV 4 also benefits from dual core processors because of Beyond TV heavily multi-threaded architecture.
CPU-Z on Godzilla’s Intel Extreme Edition Processor
CPU Cooler
While trying to push the Godzilla PVR to its limit we experienced an overheating and fan noise issue. The stock Intel cooler is designed to spin up when the processors temperature rises. The temperature while doing a few simultaneous DivX transcodes rose to a sizzling 77° C and spining the fan to 5000 RPMs causing Godzilla to roar (watch this video to hear the roar) and making its presence known! We wanted Godzilla to be, ummm, a little quieter while watching our HD shows so we had to put a muzzle on him. We replaced the stock fan/heatsink with a “monster” cooler befitting Godzilla. We chose the Coolermaster Hyper 48 for it’s pure copper design and heat pipes. Replacing the heatsink and fan reduced the temperature to 70° C at full load. Even at full load the computer is a lot quieter than the stock fan running at normal speed.
A Coolmaster Hyper 48 was used to cool the Intel CPU
This screenshot shows the CPU temperature before installing the Coolermaster Hyper 48
Godzilla PVR all Together
One crowded case
With all of its components installed, the Godzilla PVR had little room to breath. Using the Intel D955XBK motherboard we could fit two PCIe x16 cards, three PCI cards, and one PCIe x1 card. We installed three Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500s and one PowerColor PCIe x1 Theater 550 Pro based on the ATI Theater 550 chipset. The Theater 550 Pro card from PowerColor is one of the few PCIe TV tuner cards on the market. Since all of our available PCI and PCIe x1 slots were taken up we had to USB HD tuners. We installed four DVico Fusion HDTV5 USB Gold tuner cards. We wanted to install an ATI X850 video card, nVidia GeForce 7800 or even a pair of PCIe cards in SLI mode, but the Godzilla PVR would not allow it. Most of these high end cards are longer and required power adapters to power the card not allowing them to fit inside of Godzilla. We resorted to installing a passively cooled NVIDIA GeForce 6600. This barely fit in the case, with only millimeters to spare.
Godzilla PVR Picture Gallery
Beyond TV 4’s Web UI with all the TV tuners configured — to recap, we installed three Hauppauge PVR-500MCE (each has dual analog tuners), one PCIe ATI Theater 550 Pro analog tuner and four DVICO Fusion HDTV5 USB Gold USB 2.0 HDTV tuners.
The library screen showing more than ten tuners recording at once (some analog, some digital)
Show information for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the more than ten shows we recorded simultaneously. The movie took a mere 32GB on Godzilla’s RAID array.
Thanks to our eleven tuner system, we can kick back and enjoy The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
This top view of the Godzilla PVR shows how tight a fit it is when you have this much hardware crammed in one monster system.
And Godzilla from the back.
Keeping Godzilla cool was no easy task, either. Here, our heat sink tries to lower the temperature of the beast.
Inside Godzilla before the wire cleanup
Overhead view of Godzilla
Conclusion
As you can see, we built one heck of a machine.
- Beyond TV 4 Product Page
- Multi-tuner Support Page
- Beyond TV Link Product Page
- SnapStream Forums
(ask questions, discuss ideas or just listen in!) - SnapStream Store
(buy Beyond TV, Beyond TV Link, and more)
About the author: Percy Bell, Test Engineer extraordinaire for SnapStream Media, has been a pioneering early adopter for years. In the three years he’s worked at SnapStream, Percy has earned a reputation as a connoisseur of new and emerging technologies. In short, he’s the first to own everything you see reviewed on CNET. Percy has rigged up an extensive multimedia setup at home with all the latest in PC entertainment equipment. Bringing his expertise of PVR’s, and his passion for the most advanced technology, Percy created Godzilla PVR, the most intimidating PVR we’ve made yet.
January 19th, 2006 at 7:30 am
[...] January 19th, 2006
Those crazy guys at Snapstream have built an 11 Tuner personal video recorder! Although “personal” is a bit of a minsomerR [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 8:52 am
MrLefty – With that much space, 11 tuners, HD support they probably went RAID 0 for performance reasons.
Cool setup guys… impressive. How many channels do you get that there’s 11 shows on at the same time that you want to record
January 19th, 2006 at 10:57 am
[...] search records Godzilla destroys Hydra, Medusa, Tivo, and Replay Snapstream shows how to make a “ultra high end HTPC showcasing Beyond TV 4 and capable [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Has anyone discovered any reason to use this?
I have been building PVRs for some time and I find them all but useless compared to the DVR box provided by COX cable.
For one thing, all the cable tuners can tune is channels 2-127. All the shows I want are on the digital channels. While I can go IR blaster, I would have to pay for another digital tuner which already has the PVR built in.
I think at most the ability to record two shows at once is about as much as is necessary and the cable box already does this. In fact, I have 2 TVs and therefore 2 DVRs, so I can record 4 shows at once, as if that would ever be necessary.
The only ones who can use this are sites like crooksandliars.com where they need to have archives of all the news channels. For the average user this is extreme overkill…
January 19th, 2006 at 11:42 am
[...] ldn’t envision needing 11 tuners in one box, but if that’s what you need, they built one over at the SnapStream HQ. SnapStream is a company that makes Beyo [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
[...] system capable of capturing 11 different video streams.. that isn’t bad at all. Â [Check it out]
Related Pages:
[...]
January 19th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
This thing rocks. I am often recording 2 HD shows during prime time and still want to watch a 3rd (And thats just the shows i want, and i dont live alone). My problem is the noise. Could the whole system be water cooled? Im the kind of guy that would plumb the radiator outside just so i could keep the noise down.
January 19th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
SnapStream Goes Off the Deep End
Holy Cow…Snapstream, makers of the pretty cool Media Center alternative BeyondTV, bring to you Godzilla, the unholy 11 tuner beast PVR. This is THE one piece of hardware that you need to own if 11 of your favorite shows are…
January 19th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
[...]
SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR
SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR one damn huge PVR
[...]
January 19th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
SnapStream Goes Off the Deep End
Holy Cow…Snapstream, makers of the pretty cool Media Center alternative BeyondTV, bring to you Godzilla, the unholy 11 tuner beast PVR. This is THE one piece of hardware that you need to own if 11 of your favorite shows are…
January 19th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
More like Godzuki. You need more macho in your diet before you can use the “Godzillza” title:
http://www.atechfabrication.com/
January 19th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
Yawn, get a real OS and processor
January 19th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
damn…..
January 19th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Too bad SnapStream doesn’t put this kind of effort into making their software work. Beyond Media has so much potential, but they have more or less ignored it for the past year, and it is horribly buggy.
January 19th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Why does Lord Of The Rings use 33 gigs to record? How many dual layer DVDs is that?
January 19th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
[...] 01.19.06 Monster PVR Posted in Uncategorized at 11:43 am by mark Holy Crap. SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR Permalink [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Tim,
It’s in HD.
January 19th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Tim regarding the HDTV lord of the rings being 33 GB’s…
When you record an HDTV stream you are recording MPEG2 Transport Streams that have a larger bitrate because they carry much more image resolution than DVD’s do. You can then take that .ts file and convert it into a divx file or wm9 with easy to use tools like HDTV2MPEG2, and Divx convertor. Really that simple.
January 19th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
[...] k, well if $5000 falls outta the sky and hits me on the head this will be my next project. http://blogs.snapstream.com/2006/01/18/godzilla-pvr/
Posted by W [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but you could of added one more Powercolor PCI-E 1x Tuner in the extra PCI-E 16x slot. Otherwise a good build even though i would of gone with an AMD based system due to the fact that even though you can have 4 simultaneous threads going at one it still has a bottleneck and it runs hot as you found out.
January 19th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Want even more tuners? You should try MythTV. It lets you have multiple backend machines, thereby eliminating the PCI card slot limit. You can network together a virtually unlimited number of boxes, each filled to the brim with TV cards!
January 19th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
That’s pretty cool, overkill, but cool. Uhhhh, you mind letting me borrow that during March Madness?
blogged: http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/01/19/say-hello-to-godzilla-11-tuner-hdtv-dvr/
January 19th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
[...]
The monster 11 tuner system with HDTV support PVR…they keep adding the tuners. read more | digg story
Leave a Reply [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
You’re about to get Slashdotted.
Mirror link:
http://blogs.snapstream.com.nyud.net:8090/2006/01/18/godzilla-pvr/
January 19th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Good work … pitty here in Aust there isnt 11 things worth recording at once.. actually over here I think we could get away with half a dodgy analog card and a piece of string.
I squeezed 2x digital tuners 1x analog tuner, 1x satallite tuner, 4 hdds, 2 dvd burners, and 3ghz p4 all into a cheap LC17s and used the stock fans… the case sits at 102F (40C) all day long in a cupboard sitting ontop of a yamaha amp…. Spend the time to tidy your cables and make sure theres air flow, thats the key.
I’d definately reccomend the silverstone case to anyone starting out in htpc. & get fluid bearing drives if your gonna leave it running in a quiet room.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Nice, but I agree with the others regarding your choice of processor. What in God’s name possessed you to use an Intel EE? Not only are they HOOOOOOTTTTT, but they have a HUGE bottleneck when doing anything other than playing Solitaire. A 64-Bit, Dual-Core AMD would have made this a much more viable and realistic system. And why skimp on the Main video card? If you’re going to have a beast like this in your living room, put a better video card in it so you can enjoy your game playing much more. Just my three cents.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
[...] Godzilla PVR The mother of all PVR’s, I’m building this one. SnapStream Blog � Blog Archive � Godzilla PVR Posted by tnels [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Try this for your cooling needs… Seriously.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/
Well worth the time, and you can’t get any quieter than “no sound at all.”
January 19th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
11 tunners may be a little much but it would be nice to recored all 5 news cast at 6pm and still get somthing for the wife and kids too. I like the fact you have tons of space, yes the Tive will get you 70 hours. But it fill up quick with Full House, Mad about you and Gilmore girls reruns (Not my shows) It leaves little room for the shows and movies I like.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
you need some watercooling in there
January 19th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
How long before this page is slashdotted?
January 19th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
The ultimate PVR.. no really it is!
This is just insane I have always wanted a PVR but for some reason haven’t got around to making/getting one. But this.. Wow 11 Tuner PVR!! Just imagine the possibilities
January 19th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
It looks like LOTR is an HD broadcast with SmartSkip markings. HD + SmartSkip is not working in current version. When can we get this feature like the picture shows?
January 19th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
“How long before this page is slashdotted? ”
-just was
January 19th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
RAID 5 is not that much worse than RAID 0 for just archiving large files.
Just don’t put MySQL or your swap partition on it!
January 19th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
I’m a die-hard AMD junkie myself, an 4800 X2 or a FX-59 would be limited to only two simultaneous threads due to the lack of hyperthreading. This would limit the number of squeeze or chapter operations to two. Since BTV is fully thread-aware — the extra threads available from having two hyperthreaded processors allow more of these jobs to run in parallel. I have a feeling if two godzilli were compared, one built with intel 840 ee and the other with amd fx59 or x2 4800, the intel would win when pushing more than two simultaneous squeeze jobs…
just a thought…
January 19th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Your marketing of the system somewhat exceeds the specifications or usefulness of it. What are you going to do with all those tuners? Ever looked for a conflict that the system couldn’t resolve? Having all those tuners is a waste.
My MythTV system has 2.6TB of disk, just under 2TB after RAID-5. Using striping for your RAID is shortsighted, what are you going to do when you lose a disk? Everything is lost! Don’t forget that your MTBF with four disks (and losing ALL your data in the stripe set) is statistically 1/16 of the rated value. About a year if you leave it on 24/7.
It’s great that you recognize that open source PVR is the way to go, but really…
January 19th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
you could have saved some money or alternately improved performance by using an os that supported your 64 bit cpu!
January 19th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
[...] ; Posted in Nerdish, Audio/Video, Gadgets at 6:38 pm by Jason This is pretty nuts… http://blogs.snapstream.com/2006/01/18/godzilla-pvr/ 11 tuner PVR, with 1TB of space. It ended up costing him a little over $4200. Price is detailed o [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
I just setup my BeyondTV system – it’s really cool. I think I’ll throw another tuner or two into the mix. I also need to get some more HD space. This thing rocks!
January 19th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
The Godzilla PVR
This is the most powerful home theater PC ever built. It can record more than ten shows, on ten different channels simultaneously.
The oversized PC case contains 11 tuners (4 high definition and 7 standard tuners), 1 TB of storage and a dual-core P…
January 19th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
[...] Have money? Want to build a DVR? Unfortunately not everyone has the money that these guys do, but what would you bulid if you had absolutely no budget? Buy every fucking t [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
To Mark:
There’s one simple reason to use RAID 0 Instead of RAID 5…SPEED. Raid 5 trades speed for reliability with the increased overhead of writing parity data. RAID 0 gives maximum IO performance by spreading out the job of reading and writing data. Just don’t store anything you wouldn’t mind loosing. No fault tolerance…
January 19th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
[...] turns
Filed under: Hardware, Software — admin @ 5:43 pm
Snapstream shows off a 11 tuner DVR dubbed Godzilla. It contains 4 HD turners and 7 SD turne [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
You could have saved money by using AMD and an AMD mother board there cheaper with better internal design and also using a ATI video card.
January 19th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Hello from the Reality Disk:
If your going to spend this much money into an 11 tuner PVR, two things are true:
A) You will never have the time to see everything you saved.
B) If the RAID crashed and you lost all your recordings, you are just going to continue on as normal because you won’t ever find 400 hours of content that you have not seen once already or it will be repeated again.
I’m just glad they went to the extreme, it bodes well for person who will use a tamer beast. I am ready to gut my Lian-Li tower and build one knowing that this suceeded on a scale well beyond practical. I have every reason to expect success making a 4 HDTV Tuner box with 2 TB.
This is important because all of the content aired now on HD is pleasing eye candy to entice consumption, once HD is mainstream they will stop airing the HD helicpoter flyby’s of coastlines and the other really pretty stuff. They won’t justify wasting airtime on that stuff and go to money making infomercials. Yuk I better build a library of watchable content now while it is still available.
January 19th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
[...] e thing…. 11 tuners, HDTV, capable of 4 HD and 7 SD recordings running all at once. SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
What is the noise level for the machine? 6 HDs and all that fan should make plenty of noise. It’s not really ideal for HTPC if the fan noise is heard during TV watching.
January 19th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
And is there a pic of the setup with the USB TV tuners?
Where do you put up those external TV tuners and the antennas?
January 19th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Very interesting – I have a two tuner beyondtv I built – but a question: what’s with the cpu overkill? The hauppauge cards in use do the encode in hardware, so you can’t possibly need even a quarter of that very expensive cpu. People familiar with beyondtv and hauppauge will know that very successful systems have been built with even 400mhz celerons (since the video is being handled by the card), believe it or not.
True, the multithreaded showsqueeze and commercial removal is nice, but since the standard system does that during off hours, it’s really unnecessary.
Finally, DivX files generated by showsqueeze in version 4.0 are useless due to bad synch of audio to video (this is in the bug faq, from Snapstream). No patch for version 4 has been release, AFAIK, and I am a fully registered user.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Cool case, VFDs look cool! Gotta get one for my PC… Does the big dial work as a volume knob for the soundcard?
January 19th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
holy cow! this one goes to 11!
January 19th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
11 fucking tuners? Fucking riduclous. Who the fuck needs to record 10-11 channels at once? If you actually have such a need, you need some fucking help.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
I need T.P. for my bunghole.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Has no one mentioned that this looks like a beta version of BTV4? They obviously have showsqueeze working on a transport stream… I have an HD tuner, but as far as I can tell, no showsqueeze on those recordings… I would give it all up for QAM support on the HD tuners though.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Nice system. Too bad it runs windows. While that beyond tv api system looks allright mythtv on Gentoo Linux would add so many more features and stability to the system that just arent afforded by windows. Maybe try this system on mythtv? I’ve been considering building one for some time.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:22 am
[...] definition material at Better quality. For the full details checkout the snapstream blog This entry was posted on Friday, Jan [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 1:00 am
[...] now it’s most likely fake, but it’s still funny. Forget King Kong, it’s Godzilla that will have your Tivo running scared. I’ve actually been [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 1:02 am
I have 2 MCE 500’s in a 1.7g celeron 256mb ram system that consumes only 74 watts of power using SAGE TV to record in MPEG1 so that I can go DVD VCD PC and Stream over my network and easily convert to divx for long term storage with about 400gigs of HD space (enough for over 1500 hours of recordings)
cost me about $250 for the system and about $350 for the 2 MCE 500’s of which I am hoping to add a third (yes I sometimes come across conflicts but very very rarely
Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/
January 20th, 2006 at 2:04 am
Nice. I have a big childish streak in me that always makes me want to build God Box’s and this one certainly seems to be the God box of the PVR world, well atleast for now.
Now that this has captured my attention, does anyone know of a way of adding satellite support in such a way that it ould be compatible with Australian PTV via sat? Would multiple encryption cards be required? or could you slave the other sat tuners of one?
January 20th, 2006 at 2:06 am
I can kick back and enjoy “Lord of the Rings” too.
It’s called a DVD player.
$30 if I shop around.
Look into it.
January 20th, 2006 at 2:15 am
Godzilla PVR: TiVo on steroids
This PVR can record 11 channels at a time, 4 in high-def.
January 20th, 2006 at 2:47 am
[...] till racism in IT hiring practices? German division of wiki shut down by state injunction. Godzilla PVR. Man, this machine is nuts. It’s like tivo on the worst steroids. E [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 3:25 am
What about the connections to the 11 tuners?
I’m curious if you are using multiple UHF antennas for hdtv and what type of equipment you are using to distribute the cable tv signal.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:27 am
Why?
Why 1 TB? Why not 1/2? Why not 2? Sure 424 hours (17.6 days STRAIGHT) is enough? Would 212 hrs (1/2 TB) not suffice? Would 848 (2 TB) be too much?
You get 1 TB then make it RAID 0 over 4 drives, are you sure you want to watch these shows again? Anyone wanna place bets how long before a drive fails?
And then u go p4?!? WTF? No dual core amd64? That would have been more impressive.
How’s this thing sound? Can you even hear the movie over all those fans?
January 20th, 2006 at 3:29 am
Sorry to burst ur bubble but the choice of hardware and setup all seems half-assed to me but that’s just my opinion, maybe u have really good reasons for choosing what you did and I’d love to hear those reasons
January 20th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Despite the fanboy whinging, the hyperthreading EE wasn’t a bad choice for a single processor system. However you’d have seen better performance and heat issues if you configured a dual Opteron 265 – 4 _real_ cores at work.
As for the disks, you’ve made the most out of your budget but as already mentioned, the clock is ticking down to your RAID0 array disappearing in a puff of smoke. I’m afraid you needed to spend more $ on 4×500GB disks in RAID 10.
No denying you’ve built yourselves a good machine on that budget though.
January 20th, 2006 at 4:15 am
Great, now you only need to become a politician and establish 36 hour days. 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working and 20 hours watching tv
January 20th, 2006 at 4:24 am
[...] odile Dundee, but when you compare my PVR to the beast here – you see what I mean… More details and comments when I get a chance. [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 5:07 am
You do realize dont you, that a raid 0 with 4 drives quadruples the chance of catastrophic data loss of all the data on the drives?
January 20th, 2006 at 6:37 am
[...] n from seeing the unfair person being punished. I can agree with their revenge statement. Godzilla PVR (from /.) – With the third installment of our Monster PVR series, we here at Sn [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Once again cool box guys! I really enjoy seeing these “monster” boxes yall put together. I love seeing these because it really highlights what options you have with DIY PVR, unlike some *cough*MCE*cough*. Again thanks for the effort and picture log, great stuff guys!!
January 20th, 2006 at 8:34 am
[...] ici trasmissioni contemporaneamente. Impossibile? Eppure i ragazzi di SnapStream ci sono riusciti: Godzilla PVR è in grado di registrare fino a undici trasmissio [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 9:57 am
[...] 7 NTSC tuners, 1 terabyte of storage, and enough horsepower to rule the world Checkout SnapStream Blog for details. This entry was posted o [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 10:45 am
“…Percy has earned a reputation as a connoisseur of new and emerging technologies. In short, he’s the first to own everything you see reviewed on CNET…”
CNET reviews are often weeks, if not months behind product releases. Percy would certainly not be a connoisseur of new and emerging technologies if he’d wait for CNET reviews.
S.
January 20th, 2006 at 10:52 am
$4284.90? Where did he get that price added up? According to how many of each part he got it should cost around $8733.73 OUCH!
January 20th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Gabriel: I was wondering the same thing about the 7 SATA drives. It seems that although the OEM specification for the motherboard shows only 4 SATA ports there is a “build option” according to the data sheet which allows for 8 ports and if you look at the spec for the “boxed” version of the board that has all 8 ports.
Unfortunately you can’t run RAID5 across the controllers (well, not in hardware anyway). I’ve been wanting a media server for DVDs for a while but the time taken to copy 120 movies, coupled with the lack of any suitable other backup medium, means that I want storage redundancy!
What I want to know it, if these people wanted to build the mother of all PVRs, why didn’t they use 500GB drives and give it 2TB of storage?
See: http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/bk/bk_available.htm for motherboard details.
January 20th, 2006 at 11:46 am
[...] lls win, bears survive, and pigs get slaughtered". Really like TV? How about a computer that can record 11 programs at once? Disclaimer: I have and use both Snapstrea [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
does this 11 tuner system require 11 cable services to be sent to your house, or only 1, and the system records different channels? I guess you’re just paying for cable with HDTV service. Aren’t all the HD channels higher than 127 (which is where BeyondTV stops)?
January 20th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
If I didn’t have a TiVo and had tons of cash…I’d build this monster in a heartbeat!
January 20th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
[...]
Click here for my 2005 Retrospective awards
1/20/2006
Godzilla PVR
SnapStream Blog – With the third installment of our Monster PVR series, we here at SnapStrea [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
[...] look at news, events and technology at SnapStream.
« Godzilla PVR
Beyond TV 4.1: Get ready to SmartSkip through the Super Bow [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
[...] « Despair, Inc. Well Geektv did need an upgrade… SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR This entry was post [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 12:37 pm
[...]
This guy puts together a rediculous DVR. If you think your Tivo is cool think again:SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR
Posted in trends, softwa [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 5:29 pm
For the two of you that mentioned SmartSkip for HDTV, it was just released yesterday in Beyond TV 4.1:
http://blogs.snapstream.com/2006/01/20/beyond-tv-41-get-ready-to-smartskip-through-the-super-bowl-in-hd/
January 21st, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Godzilla’s impressive…. I suppose… But if you guys shopped around a bit more, you could have gone with an AMD configuration, saved yourselves about $800 cash AND created the a Godzilla of a PVR – with count ‘em – 15 tuners! By getting a motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939) with 5 PCI slots, you could have stuck 5 WinTV500MCE’s into the box, substituted an AGP 8x type video card with TV tuner for the 11th, and kept the 4 USB HDTV units you’re using currently.
Now that would have been insane. Recording 15 simultaneous tv programs. A football fanatic’s dream come true.
January 22nd, 2006 at 6:17 pm
I love you guys for doing this! Now to hook it up to 15 slings and then my media can follow me around the world? Anyway the overkill is wonderfull.
January 23rd, 2006 at 4:38 am
[...] oll by Guy Kawasaki: Hindsights (via) (tags: article speech advice hindsights life) SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR (via) (tags: pvr tv media pc article ott) [...]
January 23rd, 2006 at 4:39 am
macam babi
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:24 pm
ha-ha
I don’t even get 11 channels!!!
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:28 pm
[...] The monster 11 tuner system with HDTV support PVR…they keep adding the tuners. read more | digg story This entry was posted [...]
January 25th, 2006 at 12:05 am
[...] ;betterment of mankind”, make all three fears into one “Super-Fear”!!!1 Mike’s Media Center is B-A, but this is Super B-A. That’s all for now, G’ [...]
January 25th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I might be missing something, but at least in Europe digital tv is a big thing. Analogical tv broadcasts are scheduled to be terminated 2007 in Finland and this means big changes in current hw. Currently digital terrestial broadcasts are transmitted in 3-bundles (of mpeg-2 transport streams), each carring a number of tv and radio channels. What is neat with this digital system is that I can use a single digital tv card to record one of these _bundles_ at a time (in Linux). This means that I can e.g. watch one program and record two other at the same time (with a single tv card) and which I have found very useful numerous times.
If want to record any number of programs (and my hard disk IO will allow) I just need 3 tv cards. With current selection there are about 14 channels (free-to-air) – not that I would be interested to do record them all.
Cost: installing Linux to my old 1 GHz pc and buying digital TV card for 80 euros. (+80 euros for each additional card).
Please note that I’m not talking about HDTV (yet). More about digital tv in Finlad: http://www.digitv.fi/default.asp?path=9
January 27th, 2006 at 3:17 am
With apologies for any party-pooping inferred, you may want to be careful about going too far with the “Godzilla” name… the folks who own that franchise are *very* protective and have been known to get legal simply for something that looked lizardy and green. There are plenty of other mythical monsters you can co-opt with no worries.
January 27th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
I have been trying to build a htpc using snapstream as my guide. I have all their toys (Beyond TV, Media, Link) including the dual tuner card. I recently purchased the Divco Gold from them and installed it. The first thing beyond did was complain about mixing hardware and software encoders/decoders. In the admin section one tuner of the dual bard disappeared and the HD card took control of the radio tuner on the hapauge card. Once running all 3 cards were seen but the load was imense once the HD card kicked in with the other 2 tuners. so much so the system crashed. Not what I expected on a pentium 4 2.8 Hhz system with a gig of ram and a GeForce 6600 356oc.
And on top of it all the picture quality was less than impresive when compared to the picture directly from the TV. I’m now looking at a DVR and leaving the BeyondTV for the analog TVs. I think HDTV is still a little Beyond thier reach
January 27th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Sorry for all the typos but you get the idea
January 28th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Raid 0 ?! Why ?!
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:51 pm
[...] Intel-Based Macs SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR I have a 40 Gb, 2×250 Gb, and [...]
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:45 pm
what sound card did you use… i don’t see anything about the sound
April 4th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Hilsen fra Klovnen “Tulliball”
April 19th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
This thing rocks. I am often recording 2 HD shows during prime time and still want to watch a 3rd (And thats just the shows i want, and i dont live alone). My problem is the noise. Could the whole system be water cooled? Im the kind of guy that would plumb the radiator outside just so i could keep the noise down.
http://www.trampolinepartsandsupply.com
June 1st, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I have a much smaller multiple-tuner system that I’m constantly battling with. It’s a key piece of gear for the agency I work for, as we use it to record and review local newscasts. However, I can never feel certain that it will still be running the next morning. It’s giving me ulcers.
My questions is, how well does it run? Does it ever miss a recording due to a hardware or system problem? Rather than spend the time and money to figure out what’s wrong with mine, I might recommend to my boss that we fork it over for something like this. I’m looking for a professional solution, and it looks like this might cut it.
Thanks,
eric
August 16th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
[...] “Godzilla PVR� (11 tuners = 7 analog and 4 digital) [...]
September 9th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
As far as I can calculate, the performance of this processor is not enough to cover 11 HD recordings at the same time.
September 11th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
This system is an ultra high end HTPC showcasing Beyond TV 4 and capable of recording 11 shows, 4 high definition and 7 standard definition, at once.
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:32 pm
So can I plug this thing into my Cable box and recored multiple Digital HDTV programs and watch another all at the same time?? Can you get a cable card from the cable company and put it into one of these and eliminate the cable box all together??
November 29th, 2006 at 8:21 am
What about watercooling.. any experience? And I am curious why using raid 5?
December 6th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
[...] Since nVidia released their DualTV MCE earlier this year, we’ve wished they had drivers to support putting more than one of these cards in a single PC. After all, who doesn’t want to build their very own Godzilla DVR? [...]
February 6th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Why doesnt’ anyone ever bring up how you can actually use a box like this? I want to see how this system can support 4 or 5 TV’s/viewers. What media extender would you use? How many media extenders can you support with 802.11g, GbE, 802.11n, etc.? Recording 11 shows is cool – watching 11 recordings or 11 streams of live TV would be really impressive.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:04 am
SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR
SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR
April 11th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
[...] Suffice to say, this thing’s a beast. Check it out for yourself. [...]
April 14th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
[...] I am thoroughly enjoying my MythTV setup now that I have it recording over-the-air HDTV, but I have to admit that these folks at snapstream have me beat with their Godzilla PVR that is capable of simultaneously recording 4 HDTV broadcasts and 7 standard broadcasts, i.e., 11 shows at once. Of course, their setup costs about three times as much as mine and it’s not clear that there would ever be eleven things on at the same time that are worth recording, but nonetheless, it’s impressive. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
April 27th, 2007 at 11:40 am
This is great project.I am often recording 2 HD shows during prime time and still want to watch a 3rd,so it helpfull.
May 29th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
[...] Posted on January 22, 2006 Take a look at SnapStream’s Godzilla PVR – talk about taking PVRs to the extreme: 11 Tuners and 6 Hard Disks … [...]
June 8th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[...] Medusa PVR Hydra PVR Godzilla PVR [...]
September 4th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Hi guys, I am totally new to this PVR stuff. How many TV’s can you hook up to this system, and do you have to by the the HD convertor from your local cable company before you can watch HDTV or will yours do the same thing.
Thanks;
Chris
January 11th, 2008 at 9:01 am
[...] SnapStream Blog ” Blog Archive ” Godzilla PVR Less waiting when you order from the SnapStream Store … if you’re using multiple UHF antennas for hdtv and what type of equipment you … [...]
January 12th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
[...] SnapStream Blog ” Blog Archive ” Godzilla PVR Less waiting when you order from the SnapStream Store … if you are using multiple UHF antennas for hdtv and what type of equipment you … [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Hey there!
I am a race car driver and at the present time I am looking for a mobile (12V) 5 on board cameras solution (Pilot, Co-pilot, front, rear and instrument cluster panel)
I am going in Europe in about 2 weeks for cross country race that will take about 20 hours (10 hours per segment)
I know computers as much as most of you computer guys know how to drive.. ..
This “Godzila PVR” appears to be the best the answer to my querry… ..
How much would this cost me to build it?
How much would cost me to buy it already built?
Can I implement as well a video output for each camera so that I can see live on a monitor what is being recorded? ( I mean not me.. .. I will be kind of busy… but my copilot can take a look at the monitor now and then just to make sure the cameras are still there…LOL!!!)
Thank you anticipated for your time and effort!
March 13th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Love the project. But using the three WinTV PVR-500’s in the configuration shown would give you only three tuners. You would need to install the Hauppauge A/V cable set, which provides the second video input capability. This would consume an extra back panel expansion slot.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Cool case, VFDs look cool!
January 14th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Respected Sir \ Madam,
We are an IT firm operating from India – Mumbai since past ten years. One of our clients wants a solution over apple mac such that they want to record 4 TV channels. The channels should automatically start recording as scheduled. there could be a posibility that 2 or more channels are to be recorded simultaniously as both the required channels over lap the same time period.
pluss points required –
The output format must be .mov
should support 720/568 resolution (D1 = 720/588)
should support DV PAL compression
Our client is a TV channle provide…
Please get in touch with us as soon as possible
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