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Subscriber Bill DePierri wrote recently to ask about using a PC to record television. I'm already doing that with my home theater pc, which Bill has seen:

Terry:

We recently got a Cox DVR. It is pretty clunky with little flexibility. This got me to thinking about your comments about your PC-based DVR's, especially since I have an old Dell machine that is about to go out to pasture.

This machine is a Dell Pentium 4 with a 2 GHz Intel processor. The computer has 8K of primary cache and 512 K of secondary cache. It has a 100 MHz bus, 1GB of RAM and two 80GB Disc Drives (EIDE).

If I made the conversion to a TV recorder, I would purchase at least one large (500GB?) drive and install it in the computer.

Questions:

1. Does this machine have enough power to handle one channel of video recording?
...

Continue reading Digital Video Recorder or Home Theater PC?

Rather than focus on the standard features of SageTV, which have been covered in many reviews and on the SageTV site, I'll show some of the modifications I like.

One features I really like about SageTV is the ability to use different menu layouts and even additional functions. Don't get me wrong, the SageTV program is a fantastic program. The original menu layout is very intuitive and not cluttered. But, we all have a few things we'd like to see.... Some of these changes are implemented in the the recent version 2.1 of SageTV.

Frey Technologies has a program called SageTV Studio, which is currently still in limited beta status. Several of the folks who are using Studio have released some fantastic additions to the great base product. One of the more prominent ones today is that of Nielm, a SageTV enthusiast in Belgium.

The modified main menu screens that are part of Cayars' "STV" package are good examples. In addition to his own improvements in his STV layout, Cayars has included many of the modifications of other gurus. (If you're still running version 2.0, Nielm has a similar STV, on which Cayars' is based). Cayars' and Nielm's setups actually have additional menus that are not part of the base SageTV product. This is how they get enough visible selections to allow the new features. Even better, the menu files that control these menus and functions is editable by the user -- so we can change the labels, delete items, add more, or change them.

As you can see from these screens, some of the functions are moved from the original positions or screens. More importantly, there are new features. The "Information" link takes you to a page where you can see the local weather and weather forecast. "Stop Playback" is a function that lets you close a file that is playing -- this is important because SageTV can show the current program in a window on the SageTV screen or as a background behind the window, in addition to showing it in the normal viewing window.

At the bottom of the screen, this screen shows the program currently being recorded. That display also scrolls to show those programs scheduled to be recorded in the near future. At the bottom right corner is a view of available hard disk space, showing available space and space to be taken in the next 48 hours schedule. Cayars' STV allows this disk space display to be at the very top of the screen, allowing additional space and information.

Simply, it's standard PC, including an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, an Abit AN-7 motherboard, a cheap video card with S-Video Out, hard drives, DVD drive and three Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 TV encoding cards and one PVR-150..

My HTPC case case is a standard Antec tower case. This is not designed for the HTPC service.

For extra air flow (I have 4 TV tuner cards plus a heat-sinked video card), I added an Antec Cyclone slot fan, but that's a pretty noisy solution -- not motor or bearing noise, but the noise of moving the air. Also, the Antec Cyclone fan only lasted about 4 months before the bearing went out. Not satisfactory. I replaced it with a brand-X similar slot fan which has performed quietly and well. Imagine that...

The motherboard decision was made in concert with the processor decision. I'm a fan of the AMD Athlon XP processor because of its price compared to comparable Intel processors. The processor decision alone saved me a couple hundred dollars. I've used Abit motherboards for both AMD and Intel processors. Abit has a history of releasing new BIOS flashes for their motherboards, so I would be able to do some upgrading later.

Read more in Home Theater PC, part 2