There's no tldr; on this one. This is one of the 3 defining IT/computer events of my life (Windows Home Server and some games in the mid-90s being the other 2). Read it and you might learn more about me.
This goes back to 2005, when I built a bangin' DVR at home, in an age when they were still a pretty new concept to most people. Cable providers hadn't started offering them yet in their set top boxes and TiVo reigned supreme in commercial/mainstream spaces.
Microsoft had been dabbling in this space for a few years and had released a few versions of Windows XP Media Center Edition, with each version getting better than the one before it.
Around 2004 or 2005 is when dual tuner DVRs started to hit the market allowing a person to watch one channel while recording a different program on another channel, or recording two different programs at the same time.
When I learned of Windows XP Media Center Edition I was reminded of a print ad I saw in the mid-90s from Gateway Computer, depicting a desktop computer connected to a TV. I don't remember what purpose Gateway had in mind for this setup, but it most certainly was not for acting as a DVR, though TV tuner cards were pretty common in high-end desktops at the time. I just remember thinking that combining two different types of consumer technology platforms was a really cool idea. This was, of course, many, many years before I heard the term "convergence", but in my fantasies about the future convergence is definitely what I was imagining.
TV tuners at this time all had their own software and were a novelty. They were not prevalent, but were not rare enough that nobody knew what they were. Hard drives had recently increased in capacity to 400GB, CPU's had started using multiple cores and Intel introduced Hyperthreading. Hardware performance was starting to scale more rapidly.
I'd also started subscribing to the Microsoft ActionPack, which gave me access to personal-use licenses for a lot of things for a nominal annual fee.
I'd recently purchased a wonderful 30", widescreen Sony Trinitron, which was a wonderful TV, and had started eyeing some SilverStone computer cases that would look a lot like a stereo component or some other piece of Hi-Fi gear, and was spending too much time wandering the aisles of my local Fry's Electronics for anyone's good.
It seems all of the paths to DVR Nirvana had started to converge in life, and I started to map out in my mind what hardware I would need to make this happen. First: hard drive space. Tivos capped out at about 160GB at the time, but...I knew I could go higher. So I started my shopping list:
Silverstone chassis (something similar to their current GD10, but in silver)
2x Western Digital 400GB hard drives (these were going to be the storage drives, also they were PATA, not SATA)
1x Western Digital Raptor 74GB (this was going to be the OS drive)
Some Hauppauge SD & HD TV dual tuners
An ATI video card that had component connectivity
Some motherboard, RAM and an Intel CPU (I don't remember which motherboard, CPU or the amount of RAM)
A RAID card, likely HighPoint
A remote control with an IT receiver
A DVDR/W drive
And that was "all". I assembled the computer and installed Windows XP Media Center on the Raptor and made sure that both of the 400GB drives were in RAID0, giving me 800GB of recording storage.
So here's the thing...I had like 3 roommates at the time, and they all had first-gen Xboxes. I didn't (because I was a superior PC gamer), but I also didn't need one to watch TV because I hooked this behemoth directly to my TV. Anyway, the 4 tuners were not enough. The OS allowed for a max of 2x SD and 2x HD tuners combined, which I thought was a silly limitation. Apparently someone else did to, because I was able to Yahoo! or Google (maybe Ask Jeeves?) about it and there was a registry hack! Perfect!
And that worked. So I added 2x more dual tuners. So now I had 8 tuners, and most of 1TB of storage (in PATA lol). It all worked beautifully, with a few glitches here and there.
There was one specific website that had a lot of info and tools called TheGreenButton, currently located at https://thegreenbutton.tv. There were tools that would allow you to edit the recordings and remove commercials O_o! There were tools that did other things that I found amazing at the time, but I no longer remember.
I ran that setup for a few years before getting frustrated by the whole Cable Card fiasco that developed with Windows Vista and 7. Really, it was pretty upsetting to me because at the time there was not a way to add many Cable Cards to a single system, and I'm pretty confident that the cable industry ran late on this for computers so that they could push their own DRV solutions to market, and with QAM being introduced I couldn't even use the HD tuners anymore, then all the channels because HD instead of SD...so I eventually got a TiVo Series 3. But nothing can take away that feeling when I built this monster. It was hands-down the best DVR anyone had access to for years to come.
It also showed me that I could build something awesome with commodity parts, so ingenuity and an ambition to create something over the top just for kicks. In reality this project was was later kickstarted the first Kodi build a few years later, then the Plex builds I've done.
With streaming becoming the norm more than cable/air most of this has little meaning in today's home media setups. It's like Microsoft's Home Server (which is a totally other thing that got my mental wheels spinning in the late 00s): it got me to think about how I could integrate this piece of technology into my home, which I then did, which then led me further down the path into the world of network/server/storage.