    I've been interested in DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) since they came out in 1998. I've always wanted one, but unfortunately Tivo and ReplayTV never offered TV listings for my area making the boxes useless. Not only that, but all these services cost some decent $$$ and I am currently a full-time university student with not a lot of cash. When I heard about Windows XP Media Center Edition at WinHEC 2002, it dawned on me that I could build my own DVR out of my computer. I already heard about programs like Showshifter and Snapstream, but at the time neither could do what I eventually wanted, which was to archive MPEG-2 video and burn it onto DVDs easily at full D1 resolution (720x480) on my humble P3 500Mhz. The only solution was to buy a MPEG-2 Encoder card, off loading all the hard work onto a DSP chip instead of my processor. I settled on the brand new WinTV PVR 250 from Hauppauge. I started an open source project but immediately hit huge a snag once I got the card. Apparently Hauppauge did not included WDM-compliant drivers meaning I had no access to the card through DirectShow. This in itself effectively killed the project as there was not much that could be done without WDM-compliant drivers. In October 2002 a work around was found by Detritus, a prominent member of the WinTV PVR Board, and we now had access to the hardware via DirectShow. This allowed for a slew of software to be developed for PVR 250/350 cards including ViewPVR (Open Source), WinCapTV (Open Source), CTPvr (Soon Pay) and SageTV (Pay). I was not able to restart work on the PVR program I wanted until February 2003 due to academic commitments, even then, development has been spotty as I was inundated with so much work. Development restarted in May 2003 however after running into some licensing issues and due to other constraints, I've decided to halt work on the project.
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