Wired

Building a TiVo, a Step at a Time


Forget TiVo and ReplayTV. If you want a really super-duper digital video recorder, you have to build your own. All you need is knowledge of Linux, plenty of cash for hardware and, if anything goes wrong, hundreds of hours to troubleshoot the device. Thanks to several open-source projects, you can build your own digital video recorder that will blow boxes from TiVo and ReplayTV right off the shelf. About a dozen collaborative software projects are in the works that will transform a spare computer, or one built from off-the-shelf parts, into a homemade digital video recorder, or DVR.