A ‘common’ DVR for every TV in the house. Turn on a set anywhere, and have access to a central hard drive so that recorded shows don’t have to be watched necessarily from the TV whose DVR unit recorded them. Likewise, from any connected TV, be able to set a recording that can be viewed later from any other TV.
Is this a home network, or something completely different that’s within the reach of current technology to offer, but Comcast is holding back from us?
IIRC, even the dish companies only allow one TV to watch each “box” - so you need one for every TV in the house, right?
MythTV can do it. You can have a single server with multiple TV tuners record everything your heart desires, and multiple front-end boxes for each television.
Disadvantage: You have to be somewhat skilled in building your own machines and Linux administration to set it all up.
Alternatively, you can get some TiVos and connect them to your home network. They can share recorded items between themselves, but it’s not a backend/frontend type of architecture.
Eh…there are a couple of ways you can do this. One is by wiring your house up the right way. I actually have my house wired so that any output from any of the DirectTV DVR’s is able to be routed to any TV in the house fairly easily. But that involved running some 2000 ft. of cable in the walls during construction.
There is a free software system that you can use called MythTV that will allow you to have a front-end/back-end type of setup. Where all your files will be stored in one location but able to be viewed from several other remote locations.
As to why a lot of cable companies have DVR’s that are semi-worthless? I suspect that it’s because Tivo has a whole slew of patents that cover a lot of common dvr features.
edit to add: Damnit Friedo, you beat me to it…sigh…I will add that only the Tivo Series 2 can share video in an unhacked mode.
Since the coax is just sending the video feed from place to place the problem you run into is the control of the DVR box. Sure it’s easy to have the DVR in the living room sending a picture to the bedroom but how are you going to control the thing? You’d have to have an IR repeater to send remote signals around the house. Or they’d have to make all the boxes/remotes run on radio frequencies rather than infrared. Too much money to invest in something there is probably little demand for.
Dish Network offers a DVR which can service 2 TVs. TV1 is controlled by an IR Remote Control, and TV2 is controlled by an RF Remote Control.
It uses a dual-tuner DVR, with different outputs to each TV so that they can control the same DVR to watch different shows at the same time, including recorded shows.
