Preamble

Inspired by 6ga.net, in mid-2005, I started a project to build a TV recording system to watch TV programs aired in Japan without going there but staying here in California.

After busy investigation over a variety of Net resources, I decided to use Linux, which I feel most comfortable with, as the foundation of the system and to utilize many resources from the open source community. The first real task was to purchase a network media player (NMP) from Japan to verify its compatibility with open source resources (Linux). In August 2005, my wife proceeded the mission of picking up the NMP in Japan that I had ordered through Amazon.co.jp.
 

After the successful initial feasibility investigation, I built a PC-based server with two Hauppauge PVR350 TV capture cards purchased through eBay and wrote a set of software programs mostly in PHP and Perl. The initial development ran about 3 months. Of course, I could not test the server with real Japanese TV broadcast, so I tested it only with my local cable TV feed.
 

At the end of 2005, I went to Japan and installed the server in J-NetTV, a commercial PC housing service, in downtown Tokyo. From this point, remote Internet connections were the only way to manipulate the server. The server recorded its very first program, NHK's "Minnano Uta," on January 2, 2006 and successfully transferred it to my home server in California.
 

Notes: There are a couple of alternatives to this project: subscribing to a cable or satellite channel such as TV-Japan, and purchasing a commercial box such as SlingBox and Location-Free TV (ロケフリ）. But these solutions were found very inferior to my own because, for example, the former offers a very limited choice of programs and never re-broadcasts Olympic games focusing Japanese teams and the similar for copyright reasons; the latter usually uses a proprietary closed system played back only on a PC and/or at a "news-grade" picture quality, which significantly differs from my project goal of "watching Japanese TV programs lying on a couch with family members."

Do I need to say that my personal interest in the technology, as a Linux engineer, was of course one of the biggest motivations?
 

Proceed to Architecture.