Digital Video Recorder or Home Theater PC? July 5th, 2007
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?
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