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This web site started as a MythTV user group but since then has expanded to cover other PVR programs and setups. The main aim is to make the install / use of PVR programs even easier.

My first PVR was based on MythTV. At this time, the PC under my tv at home was a compaq Evo celeron pc with 512 Meg of Ram, a dvd player, a nvidia graphics card (with tv out) and a bog standard BT848 tv card. The box was loaded with Redhat 9.
I wanted to play with DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) cards and receive digital TV pictures and see what else I could get the box to do. This caused me to move to the VDR program as this supports DVB cards (although I always keep a copy of Myth TV on a spare hard disk). The PC is not running on Gentoo Linux and is running pretty fast as VDR doesn't need X-Windows installed.


A word on advertising

A few people have asked about the adverts on some of the pages. An easy question to answer - I do not make money from this web site. The adverts are run by google and the money pays for hosting and running the site.
If you do run a web site then have a look at Google adverts :

They are very easy to use and will help you pay for your costs.

Now the important bit - TV setups

As promised (for quite some time now) here is a picture of my home unit. The TV is a 36 inch Widescreen Toshiba TV. I picked this one as it has a built in surround sound amp and sub-woofer speaker. This means my media pc (and dvd player) can feed 5.1 Audio straight into the tv and I get all the wonderful noises flying round the room. The TV comes with four corner speakers. You can use two of these for the back corners and use the built in speakers (see the bevel area below the screen) or better still use all four and the in-built speakers become the center channel. Another selling point for this TV over all the other ones was the fact the speakers were not in a big panel on the side of the TV making it about 5-6 inches bigger. I am *very* happy with this tv. Thank you Santa ! I have now removed the CD player and the Video recorder from the stack. I have not used them for ages as the media pc does the same jobs but far better. [Update] - I was asked to record a show for someone who had gone out and forgot to set up the video. I reconnected by old video and recorded it. I was checking the tape to make sure I got the end of the show on it before handing it over and I can not believe how bad the quality of VHS is compared to digital recording.

For anyone who is interested here is the old unit (and its description to explain what all the boxes were doing. Starting at the top... The TV is a big ugly old Sony TV. Nothing fancy here. It is 4:3 (not widescreen). The top box is a Sky box (UK Satellite) and that is followed by a DVD player (which I have not used at all since the pc went into place. You can just about make out a few small boxes onto of these (just below the TV). These are the remote control sensors for my keyboard (not used very much now) and remote control. The next box down is the important one. This is the pc mentioned above. The black boxes below the PC are my cable box (still used), and a cd player and VCR (both get next to no usage now) At the very bottom you can see a pile of hard disks (on the left), I think there are about 4 old 20 gig hard disks for swapping between VDR, Mythtv and Windows (yuck), and a pile of remotes on the right (I have a one-4-all so these are pretty redundant too).

If you need to contact me, you can reach me at ed -at- pvrweb.com or leave a message on the forum as I keep an eye on it now and then.