There are no shortage out there today of home PVR software solutions, but with many being commercial offerings (including MCE) there’s not a huge number of DIY PVR software offerings that are offered for free. MythTV is probably the most well known of the alternatives, and although I intend to review this at a latter date the biggest worry for me was the Linux base, sure if you install Knoppmyth its not to hard but tweaking can be difficult. Freevo presents the same concerns. With my DIY PVR box I also wanted to serve files across my home network as well (which can be done on the Linux boxes if you know what you are doing) which narrows down the choice to a few windows players, and the two major windows free pvr software options on the market at the moment at GB-PVR and Media Portal. Now before I start a flame war there are others, but for my liking these are the only free two I could getting working in a reasonable time frame. Today I’m going to share some thoughts on GB PVR.


First things first, GBPVR is not licensed under a public license (such as a GNU) but is offered for free. I’ve always been wary of anything that is offered for free this way because there is always the chance later on that the good stuff might be taken away, but for most people this is a minor consideration.

Installation
This isn’t to hard for the average user, depending on what TV card you are using. GBPVR comes with a “tunning assistant” that is suppose to track down the channels for you but doesn’t actually work with a number of the cards that do work on GBPVR: the idea is that it will tell you where your channels are then you put them into the configuration. Admittedly this is cumbersome compared to say Media Portal, but its only a small hurdle. Hardware support in general isn’t too bad and they are adding new cards regularly.

The program guide support is good, I use TVXL as my data grabber and GBPVR has no problems bring the XML file into the system unlike other systems, however the automation options are limited and I had to do this manually. Commercial software such as Showshifter do this automatically, but you pay for what you get. The rest of the installation is fairly easy: GB PVR supports upto 4 cards and can record upto 4 channels at once, this is definitely on of its best features. MCE remote and other IR options are available and easy to install.

Out of the box
TV/ PVR
What I particularly like about GBPVR is that once you’ve got your channels tuned and your program guide loaded its easy to work, even for beginners (yes, even my wife is using it). The default skin and layout isn’t the prettiest amongst its peers but it is practical. Live TV and pausing is a sinch, no playing around with getting full screens or several menus to record. Hit pause and live TV pauses, hit record and the recording kicks in. Hit channel up or down, again no problems. Using the program guide is also simple as is setting up a pre-record.

Radio/ Internet Radio
Whilst the TV and PVR features are great, the Radio is absolutely pathetic, support for Hauppauge WinTV PVR350 only. I’ve got the model up (the 500) and there is no support for it at all. There is some compensation though, and that’s a reasonably stocked list of internet radio feeds from Shoutcast. I’ve got to admit that I’m hooked on Club 977 the 80’s channel. Using Shoutcast feeds does limit your options to add extra channels, but none the less the pick up speed for the feeds is amazingly quick (I don’t think they could possibly be nearly as quick on a Real or WM feed) and the sound quality superb.

Music/ Video/ Recording Libraries
These are practical but far from pretty. There is no direct IMDB support so movies aren’t easily categorized. They work is all I can say, but I’ve seen much nicer interfaces.

Plugins
There is a reasonable number of plugins available on the wiki here and also in the forums, but I’ve got to say that in my experience many a buggy and not worth the effort. The DVD to MPG ripper isn’t too bad, I’ve been backing up a number of DVD’s my son watches so he’ll stop getting his hands all over them. I can’t help that think that if they open sourced GBPVR the community would grow and the quality of plugins would as well.

Other
There’s the ability to launch third party programs from GBPVR that comes in nifty for people running things like MAME. A nice touch that allows the interface to be used for other things as well

Overall
It’s not perfect, but the best thing I can say is this: I’m currently using GBPVR as my choice of PVR on my box at the moment over a number of its peers. Once you get it set up it does a reasonably good job across the board and its really, really easy to teach others how to use it as well. If you prefer Windows you’ve got to put this one on your list.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 9:31 am and is filed under GBPVR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.