Hi all
I’m looking for some thoughts, recommendations, stories of good or bad experiences etc. I think my basic question is what’s the best way to get PVR functionality for live TV from an antenna?
The longer story:
We’ve had Comcast cable and a Tivo for the last three years. The service has been pretty good. In a couple of months we’re moving back to a house where we previously lived. There is no cable service there. We used to have DirectTV. We needed to have the dish a long way from the house because of trees which violated the maximum cable length rules but… it generally worked okay except with really dense clouds.
I’d be happy to live without the TV but… my housemates don’t share that feeling. I’m tempted to try Dish Network this time and get the first year new customer discount but… they require a 24 month contract, I don’t know how well it would work with the length of cable and, most of all, I’d really like to break free of paid TV service.
We should be able to get good internet service via DSL. We have a Roku box which is good for NetFlix and a lot of other stuff. but… we’d still like at least some live TV.
Here in southern New Hampshire there are only officially a couple of local channels but we’re in a pretty good high location. I used to have a TV in the attic and even with a simple dipole indoor antenna I could get quite a few channels with reasonable reception. That was pre-digital TV but even so, the signals were good enough to suggest that a yagi type antenna on the roof would work well.
After having the Tivo, it would be a difficult step backwards to lose PVR functionality. So… what’s a good media center solution?
Windows Media Center looks pretty good from what I’ve read. We really want a dedicated device, not run it on a laptop or something and of course we want it on the big screen TV, not watch it on a computer.
So… one way is obviously to buy a new Windows 7 desktop with good enough specs and add a TV tuner (I guess there are digital tuner cards). Then how do I get it onto the TV? I thought I’d just make sure I had a good video card and an HDMI or component video cable. But… it seems like streaming from Windows Media Center to an Xbox is what people do. Not being into gaming I really know nothing about Xbox. They look kind of cool with the Kinect so I’m sure we’d use it for other things but it would primarily act as an expensive video card but… good video cards seem kind of expensive so an Xbox sounds like good bang for the buck in what it does.
But… now I’m talking about having two “computer” boxes next to the TV :eek: It just feels like it’s getting too complicated.
It seems like the Xbox by itself can do most of what we want except that it doesn’t do live TV. I couldn’t find any TV tuner “extender” for it.
I know there are things like Boxee and XBMC but they don’t do live TV / PVR either.
So… any thoughts? Maybe I’m expecting too much. We can cope with something that is not as well integrated and smooth as the Tivo but we may just have to bite the bullet and go for Dish Network which I’ll be a little disappointed about. I’m quite technically competent as a software developer (but nothing to do with media) and a radio ham but… I’m a bit out of touch with this stuff.
Thanks