Build Your Own?

[mmasw]

Stipulating up front that this may be an ignorant premise:

I wonder if anyone has actually built their own dvd recorder. It certainly seems that just about every commercial recorder available....even the good ones.....have some drawbacks. And the good ones seem to be rather expensive.

Setting aside the Tivo/Replay/etc option, the other features of a recorder certainly seem available in component form.

The first question I guess would be if a multi-purpose card like the ATI AIW would capture the video it "sees" (no constant manual adjustment for contrast/color saturatio, etc) and do so on a timer basis. They certainly appear to. Maybe their is an input limitation....not sure about that.

Assuming video/capture/record card does a sufficient job....it would then seem possible to build a good multi-purpose dvd recorder without some of the limitations of the commercial models, maybe even at a competitive price.

You could probably get a sufficient case and power supply, along with a MB/CPU combo (say a P4 2.6Ghz) for $250. The ATI card would bump the cost up to around $450. A small hard drive for the OS and say a 120-160GB hd for capture. You're up to $650. A dvd writer like the TDK and it's around $800 which seems to be somewhat comparable to the better commercial units. There would probably be other incidental items you'd want like an NIC card, firwire etc.. So I guess the cost could easily rise a bit. There would also be the issue of placement and bringing in the feed. I'd want it networked to my other pc and to use the same monitor/mouse/keyboard....KVM.

It would be more of a pc then a television component....but maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe, it's too much effort and expense. But it would certainly give you more flexibility, more features, more editing function.

I'm sure there are other disadvantages.....any thoughts?

[donpedro]

Home made DVD Recorder with HD