Actually, I’m thinking of setting up both mine & my husband’s PCs to do this if it sounds like it’ll be simple enough. I think we may have the most expensive pieces already taken care of… we may just need a cable box and some cable to do it.
Here’s what we have to work with:
[ul]Two semi-high end PCs with Windows Media Center Edition 2005 on each (each is less than 1 year old with lots of memory and drive space - we bought them for gaming).[/ul]
[ul]Two brand-new 27" LCD HDTV Widescreen “monitors” (xmas gifts to each other).[/ul]
[ul]Digital cable service.[/ul]
[ul]A spare 200 GB hard drive that’s just sitting in a box.[/ul]
I’ve started doing some of the research, but wanted to see if there’s anyone out there who has tried this. There’s a pretty decent tutorial on the Windows site explaining how to set it up and I’ll have a better idea of what I need to do once I get home from work and can actually mess around with it. Anyone have any pointers that might help?
I use media center. It’s one of those things that five years from now you’ll chuckle at how fidgety it was to set up.
I use the HP express card analog tuner for my laptop. I run a cable from my satellite receiver to an adapter cable that plugs into the tuner card.
There’s an infrared jobbie that plugs into the usb port on the computer side and has a little button size attachment for the eye of the cable or satellite box. It’s on a cable. That’s what allows the remote to communicate with the computer and cable/sat box.
The plugging in is pretty easy. Setting up the remote is the time-consuming part.
Anyway, once you get it set up it works sort of like a fancy VCR. You download the programming guide, pick the show you want to record sort of like you would with a regular DVR.
The big limitation is that you tie up your whole system with the one show that you’re recording, at least with my satellite receiver.
Also, it’s not very portable, unless you want to redo the setup, which you probably don’t want to do.
The one thing you didn’t mention was a video capture card. I’d get one with 2 tuners so you can watch a show that’s different than the one you’re recording.
Also, is this going to be purely for DVR functionality, or do you also plan on making the shows you record portable, like to an iPod or DVD or something? If so, I’d check out Media Portal instead of Windows Media Edition. It’s free, open source, and really easy to get running, and it doesn’t put a bunch of DRM garbage on your recordings. That makes it super easy to watch recorded shows over a network, edit out commercials, and throw it on your iPod if you’re into that kind of thing.