Psuedo Guru Blog by a wannabe guru with spelling issues.

Pico ITX PVR

If you have been following my last few posts, you know that I finally got my Artigo Pico ITX system up and running with Windows XP Pro. Now for the next step...do something with it!

Since I spend much of the year in Japan, I wanted to have access to good old USA TV (really sick of Japanese variety shows). I didn't feel like setting up Tivo + a Slingbox, so why not see if this little system is up to the task of being a Pico-ITX PVR (Personal Video Recorder)?

I had a spare Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro USB stick lying around (actually I bought it for my laptop, but almost never used it). It came with TVCenter Pro, which has some PVR functionality built in, so I gave it a shot.

Initially I hooked it up to my cable TV connection, but the cable signal is Analog, and the Via C7 processor was just not up to the task of encoding analog video in real time. Instead of giving up, I installed an antenna (not the cheapo mono-pole the USB stick came with) and tried capturing some digital video. Guess what, it worked! I had to use the uncompressed native file option to minimize the processor overhead, but once I did that I had no trouble recording hours of video...well some trouble. Read on...

The TVCenter Pro software has an almost fatal flaw...it insists on showing a TV preview whenever you open it. Since the Via processor in the Artigo is not up to the task of displaying live video, the CPU instantly spiked at 100% and I was unable to select the "epg" button (for Electronic Programming Guide) at the top in order to schedule a recording...I had to kill the process. Fortunately I found a workaround. I setup Remote Desktop access on the machine (needed to do this anyway to access it from Japan), then launched TVCenter. Viola! I get a nice error message stating "Failed to start preview", but it didn't kick me out of the program. Thus I was able to click on the epg link and schedule a recording remotely (which is what I wanted to do in production anyway).

The resulting files where quite large (about 6 GB per hour of video), but I also installed Divx Converter, which I used to post process the files, ending up with about 600 MB per hour in home theater mode...a 1/10th reduction with almost zero visible loss of quality (will likely try lower resolutions later to see if they compress better and still retain sufficient quality). Fortunately I installed an 80 GB hard drive in this system, so I have some room to play around locally...I also have a 500 GB NAS on the local area network if I need some additional storage.  UPDATE: I actually experienced significant audio drift with Divx Converter, so gave up on it. Am now using AutoGK instead. Better quality, and FREE!. Note: if you get the "EXCEPTION: Open avi failed." error, go to C:\Program Files\AutoGK\VDubMod\aviproxy, double click on proxyoff.reg and merge it into your registery (details here).

Some notes about accessing the system remotely. I have a VPN router at home, so I was able to setup a secure connection between my Artigo in the USA and my system in Japan. If you don't have such a router, you will probably need to forward port 3389 to your PicoITX PVR system's IP address in order to setup a Remote Desktop session. Also, I setup a DynDNS account so that I could access my system by hostname even though it has a shifting dynamic IP address (my router has DynDNS support built in). As a fall back, I also created a little Java program to detect when my router's public IP changed and email the new IP to me (will post this program at a later date).

While it is possible to copy large files using Remote Desktop if you expose your client's drives (click "Options <<", then "Local Resources" while logging in via the Windows Remote Desktop Client), I always have problems with file transfers dying in the middle...plus it means I need to leave Remote Desktop up for the entire copy session. Instead, I installed FreeFTPd. This let me setup an SFTP server on the Artigo, then connect to it via WinSCP (you can either do this over the VPN or have your router forward port 22 to your Pico ITX system). Once you do this, you can securely copy files without having to keep RDP up, and you can easily resume transfers that die halfway. The downside is that WinSCP is often pretty slow, but I usually setup the file copy then go to bed (or on a long errand).

Also, I had to setup the BIOS entry to reboot the machine on power failure...it would not be fun to be in Japan when the power fails in the US, and not have a way to push the "On" button. I also got a cheap UPS system to make a lost power event even less likely...since the Pico ITX uses a rediculously low level of power, I got the cheapest I could find and only plugged the Artigo into it, it should be able to last a few hours at least.

If you are like me and are too cheap to pay for a premium electronic programming guide (EPG), then you can find out the TV listings for your area via TitanTV. From the home page, click TV Listings, then select Digital Broadcast from the drop down menu, enter the area code where your Pico-ITX PVR system is, and see what is playing. I use this the the Manual Recording option in TVCenter Pro to schedule my recordings.

That's about it for now. Might do some revisions over the next few days.