VDR - The Video Disk Recorder: Hardware

VDR - The Video Disk Recorder
Hardware

To run the VDR software, you need a computer with a decent amount of RAM (at least 512 MB) and a large hard disk (1 TB 2.5" drives are a good choice, because they are pretty quiet). It is strongly recommended to provide for the risk of disk failure, because losing hundreds of recordings can be a traumatic experience! So you should at least use two disks in a RAID-1 (mirrored) configuration. If one of them fails, it can be easily replaced without data loss.

To receive digital tv you need at least one device that can handle DVB-S (satellite), DVB-T (terrestrial) or DVB-C (cable). This can be either a PCIe card that is plugged into the computer, or a USB device. If you want to receive HDTV, you may want to get a device capable of handling DVB-S2 or DVB-T2, respectively.

Since you will also want to be able to view DVB programmes live, or replay your recordings, you will need some way of displaying them. Originally VDR was designed to work with so-called "full featured" DVB cards. These are devices that have both a DVB receiver and an MPEG decoder for displaying the data. There are two plugins that support such cards: "dvbsddevice" can be used with the full featured cards that follow the Siemens/TechnoTrend design, while "dvbhddevice" is for the TechnoTrend Premium S2-6400 Twin HD. Unfortunately, neither of these cards are produced any more. This is a great pity, especially for the TT S2-6400, which provides a very easy way of setting up a dual DVB-S2 receiver with hardware decoding. As an alternative you can use, for instance. the softhddevice plugin or the vaapidevice plugin.

The hardware I have chosen to build the Video Disk Recorder consists of the following components:

Motherboard ASRock J4105M
Intel® Celeron® J4105 CPU @ 1.50GHz
2 x HDD 2.5" 2TB ST2000LM007 (configured as RAID-1) as video storage
upgraded to 2 x HDD 2.5" 4TB ST4000LM024 (configured as RAID-1) as video storage, mounted in ICY DOCK SATA Hot Swap frame for 4x 2.5" SSD/HDD MB607SP-B
2 x SSD 2.5" 120GB SA400S37 (configured as RAID-1) as system disk (20 GB used)
8 GB RAM
2 x Digital Devices Cine S2 V7A
1 x Digital Devices DuoFlex S2 V4A Extension
1 x Digital Devices DuoFlex C/C2/T/T2/ISDB-T Extension
1 x Digital Devices DuoFlex CI
PC casing SilverStone SST-ML04B - Milo Micro ATX
Power supply PicoPSU-160-XT with LEICKE 120W 12V 10A external mains adapter
FLIRC USB (2nd Gen) Universal Remote Control Receiver for Media Centre
Dreambox iDream Remote Control 7020 HD

Here are a few pictures of my VDR hardware

VDR Hardware