VDR is a software which turns a standard PC with Linux and a DVB card to a full featured digital video recorder. It allows the watching and recording of digital TV. There are several plugins that make it possible to watch additional media formats like DVD, (S)VCD and DivX.

My VDR box

In june 2002 I became aware of VDR. Then in summer 2002 I began building my own VDR box using a Intel Pentium MMX 233 as a basis. To use the box for some more expensive operations like DivX replay, I changed the system to a AMD Duron 1.2GHz processor in February 2003. Then I integrated a front panel with 11 buttons using the gameport of the mainboard and my joystick plugin for VDR. This allows me to control VDR almost completely without the remote control.

In September 2003 I replaced the 60 GB Seagate hard disc with a Samsung 160 GB one. At the same time I switched from the Duron 1200 to an Athlon XP 1700 (Thoroughbred Core, 1467 MHz) underclocked to 1100 MHz, cooled by a Zalman 7000A-Cu. This gave me a real cool system with a CPU temperature below 45°C.

Components

• Standard ATX desktop case 7106b
• PC Winner 235W ATX Power Source
• Asus A7V8X mainboard
• AMD Athlon XP 1700 processor (1467 MHz) running at 1100 MHz
• 256 MB DDR-RAM
• Samsung SV1604N 160GB hard disc
• Toshiba SD-M1602 DVD-ROM drive
• Technotrend DVB-C card
• T6963C controlled graphical LCD display with 240x128 pixels

Operation System

The used OS is a SuSE Linux 9.0 minimum installation with some additional development tools. To save some time during boot I compiled a minimized kernel with all things disabled which are not needed. I am using kernel 2.6.4 with LIRC patches.

Software

On my box is running VDR 1.3.4 and the following plugins:

• dvd 0.3.4-rc10
• graphlcd 0.1.0-pre7
• joystick 0.0.3
• mp3/mplayer 0.8.3
• osdteletext 0.3.2