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From: Sue Morton on 3 May 2010 22:05
While you're waiting for various thoughts :-) you might search this
group in Google... lots of discussions over the last few years and there
are many options, none perfect for every situation IMO...

My thoughts:

Windows 7 or XP (don't use Vista) - for XP can be Media Center edition
SageTV Media Center for EPG (Electronic Program Guide) plus all around
good stuff
-- good solid product for recording, great community and company
support, many community-written customizations (not all for
faint-of-heart however)
Tuner cards - depending on type of card they can drag on the CPU, and
drag on the disk system
Connections to set-top boxes -- tuner cards need to be able to change
channels on these, need IRBlaster capable card USB-UIRT hookups
Connections to TV
Connection to internet
Do you want to stream from the HTPC to other TV's in the house?
Additional considerations.

There's my "thoughts", for starters.

Bob Donald, G'Bo, and others will be along shortly to give you their
thoughts.
--
Sue Morton

"Russ B"
> Our DVD recorder recently stopped working (looks like a bad DVD drive)
> so I'm thinking about getting a new PC to record television. I really
> don't want to spend a great deal of time setting one up right now so I
> was looking at this Asus unit from Best Buy (I can get this locally
> and save the shipping):


From: Bob Donald on 3 May 2010 23:16
Ok, I'll chime in, and try not to sound like a SageTV fanboy :) Sue did
pose a bunch of good questions, there are many things to consider. If we
knew exactly what your needs were, we could toss out suggestions.

If your looking for a quick and dirty setup then Windows 7 media center does
look pretty cool. Actually, Media Center was the only thing that really made
Vista useful IMO. It will handle your TV recording, DVD playback, netflix,
etc... from one UI. It has it's limitations, such as no commercial skipping
<although drm-ms toolbox can be set up if you really want to go through
that>, the only way to stream your shows to another tv in the house is with
an xbox 360 <sagetv and beyondtv offer different hardware/software solutions
for this. Lets not forget the drm issue that comes with it. A couple of
years ago NBC "accidentally" sent a drm flag so anyone recording shows that
night got a black screen with a drm message. Supposedly it was an accident,
but I'm not too thrilled with MS or a network being able to have this kind
of control.

Beyond TV was a nice solution for a while, but they stopped development on
it, and I was not happy with their support when I did have a problem.
Glennbo has a good handle on this one, so he can give a more indepth review
of it. I used it for a year and switched to Sage.

SageTV rocks! I started with the one program with a couple of tuners, then
ended up building a q9300 quad server with 7 tv tuners in it <5 atsc, 2
satellite>. They offer a couple of different softsled <software that
connects to the server so that you can watch the recorded shows across your
network>, as well as a hardware box. I added one of the hd200's to my main
tv, and now I can not only access the tv shows <with automatic commercial
skip>, but my music, DVD's, Blu Ray's and pics and videos that I dump on the
server. I'm getting ready to add a second one for the bedroom. I also have
a couple systems that run their placeshifter which lets you watch everything
but the blu-ray's from any computer on the network. You also have online
services like hulu, netflix, comedy central, cnet tv, etc.... You can also
dump the shows to DVD, and edit out the commercials. Once it's set up it's
an awesome all inclusive network media setup, but as Sue stated it's not for
the faint of heart.

Hardware wise, this system looks like a good starting point if it's just
being used as a PVR. You can start off with the w7 media center, and move
to BTV or SageTV later on. Personally I like the hauppauge 1600 for a tuner
card since it is a dual tuner and comes with a blaster to control a set top
box. I havent found a usb tuner that has IR control to do this. You could
probably get by with something like the Revo, but this definitely gives you
room to expand if you want to take it further than a basic video recorder.
Remember that you will need to buy a MCE remote with the usb reciever, but
those can be had for 20 or 30 bux. This system also gives you the option to
add a blu ray barebones drive to it.

Bob


"Sue Morton" <867-5309(a)domain.invalid> wrote in message
news:hrnvdj$i57$1(a)speranza.aioe.org...
> While you're waiting for various thoughts :-) you might search this
> group in Google... lots of discussions over the last few years and there
> are many options, none perfect for every situation IMO...
>
> My thoughts:
>
> Windows 7 or XP (don't use Vista) - for XP can be Media Center edition
> SageTV Media Center for EPG (Electronic Program Guide) plus all around
> good stuff
> -- good solid product for recording, great community and company
> support, many community-written customizations (not all for
> faint-of-heart however)
> Tuner cards - depending on type of card they can drag on the CPU, and
> drag on the disk system
> Connections to set-top boxes -- tuner cards need to be able to change
> channels on these, need IRBlaster capable card USB-UIRT hookups
> Connections to TV
> Connection to internet
> Do you want to stream from the HTPC to other TV's in the house?
> Additional considerations.
>
> There's my "thoughts", for starters.
>
> Bob Donald, G'Bo, and others will be along shortly to give you their
> thoughts.
> --
> Sue Morton
>
> "Russ B"
>> Our DVD recorder recently stopped working (looks like a bad DVD drive)
>> so I'm thinking about getting a new PC to record television. I really
>> don't want to spend a great deal of time setting one up right now so I
>> was looking at this Asus unit from Best Buy (I can get this locally
>> and save the shipping):
>
>


From: Bob Donald on 3 May 2010 23:26

>
> Machine-wise, they don't say what class pentium it is, but with an 800Mhz
> front side bus, I'm guessing it's a P4?

It says it's an E5400, 2.7ghz dual core. As long as you arent trying to
watch it while it's recording 2 shows and doing the comskip it should work
out pretty well. I now use your Celeron example when advising others about
HTPC's when they want to cut costs :)


From: Bob Donald on 4 May 2010 00:21

"Russ B" <ElmSTUPIDITYertfudd(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9D6DB580F27BDnotverybrightguy(a)198.186.192.200...

> Most of the time, I expect to record 1 show at a time with the recorder
> and be watching any shows directly off the antenna. There may be an
> occasional need for 2 recordings at the same time. My wife is not Sue
> Morton when it comes to technology-she may balk at this idea unless I
> make it pretty simple for her.

Well, this machine will go above and beyond that. If you are going off of
the antenna, you can toss extra usb tuners as you find deals on them. I've
ran into various usb tuners for 20 or 30 bux, so that's not an issue. We
were running into the issue of ABC, CBS and FOX all showing some good shows
at the same time, so I just loaded it up with a hodge-podge of different
tuners. I've had this q9300 recording 4 hi-def shows at the same time,
while processing the commercial skipping and it was taking less than 30% of
the cpu. It will be remote/menu driven, so I doubt she will have a problem,
will probably fall in love with the interface after 5 minutes, mine did.
She has no computer experience other than AOL, and now she's a wiz at it.
Just turn the tv on, hit the up/down/left/right arrows on the remote, and
your golden.

> The DVD recorder worked ok except for the time limitation-only about 4
> hrs on a disk at decent quality. Be nice to hack it to a HD
> recorder...has anyone done that?

The nice thing about this is that you wont need to dump it to DVD, unless
you want to take it from TV to TV, or go mobile with it. Now, when you say
HD recorder, do you mean HD-DVD or Blu-ray? It will get expensive, not to
mention cumbersome as you would have to go to an external program like Nero
or Total Media to create the content. If you are looking at backing up the
mpg files to these mediums, you'll go broke between the price of the burner
and blank media. It's cheaper just to have it record to a big drive. I set
mine up with 2 1tb drives in a raid 1configuration so we dont lose all of
the shows if a drive fails, but even I'll admit that it's probably overkill
:) So far we havent gone over 400 gig, and that's with recording a bunch of
shows that I MAY want to watch someday. Between that and the image of the
main drive, I can have the full system with all the shows back up and
running in an hour or two. You can go as simple or as complex as you want.
The programs will reside on the hard drive from Media Center <or any other
htpc software> and you can watch them whenever, or copy them to flash drive,
portable drive, etc..... I only make DVD's when it's some show/series that I
want to archive or share, and want to free up hard drive space.


From: Bob Donald on 4 May 2010 00:27
Yeah, that thing has been cranking constantly for you for what, 2 and a half
years? I think HDTV would be harder on the cpu though, wouldnt it? Since
it's software encoding, and most cards that record SDTV have the encoders
built into them, at least the ones I've seen. I know that there is no
re-processing, but isnt the initial recording of the stream hitting the cpu
pretty hard?

> It goes a heck of a lot further than I would have expected it to. I think
> HDTV is less of a task (processor wise) than SDTV, which has to be encoded
> on the fly. HDTV is already mpeg transport stream, and you only have to
> record exactly what's coming in, with no re-processing required.
>
> --
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