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Or another way to put it, if recording an Analog signal is going to be "good enough," then what are these companies going to (or try to) put in place to "protect" that content?

But, outside of that, IMO, most of the people with PVR solutions going through their PC are recording analog cable/analog signal... basically, ANALOG.

Have you tried recording from a digital source like a digital cable box and have it be anywhere near as simple as, say, with a PVR built into one?

I have.

For reasons I'll leave out, I had a PVR setup on Windows. In order for me to get the scheduling to work properly and in a TiVo-esque way, it required me to cobble together Girder (for sending the "channel numbers" through a serial cable attached to my digital device) and TVHolic for getting/listing the TVXML cable listings and attempting to schedule the "recording" function
Now, that I'm not going to get into because I was using a Canopus ADVC-100 and Scenalyzer because it was a DV devince... kludgey, to say the least.

The end result was weeks of getting all that plugged in together to try and mimic TiVo functionality and still (however minimal it might be) getting "less perfect" recording than with a native device integrated into the receiver.

I know there are others out there, MythTV (is a great one) and it is actually simpler to setup on linux than windows... but there still isn't great integration with channel changing and those tuner cards because almost all of them assume you want to record what's coming in on the tuner card (ie, channel 42) and not channel "3" or some other AV input.

C'mon... hands down easier to use the integrated receiver/PVR with digital, and that's the way I see the industry going, don't you?

GB-PVR is great - I use it in conjunction with myHTPC (which is also freeware) and it works like a charm.

I also use Girder and an ATI Remote Wonder for my HTPC setup. The ATI remote came bundled with a Radeon 7500 All In Wonder and they work flawlessly together. The MyHTPC software also works wonders. There is an ATI Remote Wonder plugin available for MyHTPC too.

As for the keyboard and mouse, I use a Logitech cordless mouse and keyboard which does the job nicely. I keep the mouse on the coffee table and the keyboard in one of the drawers. The only tricky part is keeping the RF receiver on the computer far enough away from the components in your home theater as the cord on the unit is not very long.

I also have a 4 port USB hub running to a spot under the couch that allows me to quickly connect or disconnect things like USB Thumb Drives or USB Gamepads. I use the gamepads for many of the games on the system like GTA Vice City and MAME. Specifically I like the Gravis Gamepad Pro (BB $15, Nice mapping software), the Nyko AirFlo PC (BB $20, Dual Analog sticks, Air Flow technology), and if you can find it the GF USB Control Pad (BB $10, Dual Analog sticks). All of the gamepads work well with Girder and the games I use them for. Sometimes it is nice to have 3 or 4 different gamepads for N64 Emulators because it is easier to know which gamepad you are configuring. Before I had 4 Gravis Gamepad Pro's which was a pain because I had to label them 1 - 4 but windows would not allow me to change their names.

Of course VNC is a must but aside from that if you get your bindings tight in girder you can do almost anything with MyHTPC and a good remote.

I also use Girder and an ATI Remote Wonder for my HTPC setup. The ATI remote came bundled with a Radeon 7500 All In Wonder and they work flawlessly together. The MyHTPC software also works wonders. There is an ATI Remote Wonder plugin available for MyHTPC too.

As for the keyboard and mouse, I use a Logitech cordless mouse and keyboard which does the job nicely. I keep the mouse on the coffee table and the keyboard in one of the drawers. The only tricky part is keeping the RF receiver on the computer far enough away from the components in your home theater as the cord on the unit is not very long.

I also have a 4 port USB hub running to a spot under the couch that allows me to quickly connect or disconnect things like USB Thumb Drives or USB Gamepads. I use the gamepads for many of the games on the system like GTA Vice City and MAME. Specifically I like the Gravis Gamepad Pro (BB $15, Nice mapping software), the Nyko AirFlo PC (BB $20, Dual Analog sticks, Air Flow technology), and if you can find it the GF USB Control Pad (BB $10, Dual Analog sticks). All of the gamepads work well with Girder and the games I use them for. Sometimes it is nice to have 3 or 4 different gamepads for N64 Emulators because it is easier to know which gamepad you are configuring. Before I had 4 Gravis Gamepad Pro's which was a pain because I had to label them 1 - 4 but windows would not allow me to change their names.

Of course VNC is a must but aside from that if you get your bindings tight in girder you can do almost anything with MyHTPC and a good remote.

MythTV is the single best HTPC piece of software available.

And unfortunately is pretty much useless to the millions of us running Windows. :-/

All I want is TiVo-like software for the PC-- and not something that is a total pain in the arse to setup. Should be fairly simple. The nicest program I've found so far is MyHTPC (My Home Theatre PC) -- but it has it's own issues to deal with.

I agree with the parent poster.

With HDD capacity going up, the best way to backup you media is to move them to a big array of disk.

Instead of repeatedly moving to different media types, simply copy directly to a file system...This way you get economies of scale as the price of HDD-based storage comes down

As a side note: this also makes retrieval easier too. Set up a front end (I recommend myHTPC and simply stream to the display\listening device of your choice. Voila! You don't need to change pesky CD\DVDs anymore either!

By far the best place is indeed avsforum. just one warning, everyone raves about the infocus X1 over there. That being said if you are going for a true home theatre system make sure you keep in mind your requirements like: - image format (4:3, 16:9) - room type (controlled light, living room etc..) - What will you watch the most? (tv, dvd, pc etc..) - What will you use to feed the projector? (tuner card, PC, video switch etc..) - Will you need true HD ? (requires true HD components like HDTV tuner cards etc..) and don't fall into the fallacies of buying a PC projector if that's not what you want (I have seen many people do this). just my 2cp as a proud owner of a Epson Home lite 10 using myhtpc.

Why not just build your own media/Home theather PC? It's easy, far more flexible and there are some great freeware apps to do so like

http://www.myhtpc.net

There's a whole community built around these things. Check this out:

http://www.htpcnews.com

My "free" HTPC went from Freevo, to mythTV, to Knoppmyth, to the (gasp!) Windows-based (free for personal use, not open source) myHTPC front end.

The author has not released anything for it since August because he's coming out with a new and improved version sometime real soon.

Despite that, there's an active community writing/tweaking modules for it, and I've got it to do what I want so far (show the TV listings and weather) since I've not got a Hauppauge card yet.

I decided to go with myHTPC because for me the learning curve was not quite as steep re: $distro vs. W2K pro.

I've got a wireless nic in it for the TV/weather updating, use TightVNC to admin it, use it with my StreamZAP remote to control Winamp, etc.

I almost went with a Linux solution, but just getting this box set up (in an Antec Overture case, btw) has tickled my hardware/fiddling bone enough and I'm able to use it now. YMMV

You could waste your time with a beta build of snapstream. Or even go through installation hell with MythTV.

Or you could just get the excellent Windows based free alternative MyHTPC. MyHTPC is modular and it works, its is also incredibly customizeable.

myHTPC (runs on windows)
MythTV (runs on linux)

Both are free.

You didn't mention whether you were looking to run Linux or Windows or OS X, but I think the principles are the same.

This is a good Windows-only setup using mostly freeware tools:

DVD Decrypter to rip the DVDs to macrovision-free/region-free ISO images

Daemon Tools to mount the isos as virtual drives on demand

MyHTPC as a TV-friendly filesystem shell (in combination with some simple batch scripts to control Daemon Tools, several of which can be found in the MyHTPC forums)

Zoom Player to play the DVDs (it's fast, full-featured, and you can turn off the GUI entirely which is nice on a TV.

You will also want WinDVD: not to play the DVDs, because the interface is so bulky and slow, but because you will need good MPEG-2 codecs and I don't know of any free ones as good as the filters that come with WinDVD. Zoom Player has a feature that automatically finds the codecs and registers them for you. (AC3Filter is a free AC3 audio codec that is comparable to InterVideo's.)

There are loads of ways to do it in OS X and Linux. Somebody who knows better than me is sure to post them.

myHTPC does that... I guess the trick is to find the right PC card to ouptut to the plasma... Would that need to be upscaled? I wonder if that upscaling could be done on the fly.

*Shrug* good luck... although if you have an extra terrabyte raid laying around and a plasma tv, you probably can afford whatever solutions are out there to solve this problem without cobbling something together yourself (but that's half the fun!)

E.

myHTPC combined with a plugin for it called simpleVideo is the frontend you are looking for.

I mentioned this last time we all had this discussion but nobody picked up on it. I picked up an old ATI 8500 all in wonder cheap cos it was end of line - its a decent card and can just about manage deux ex 2 :-) but it has the killer app for this sort of thing - a RF remote.
PC in the spare room, svid and audio cables running under the floor to the stereo/TV, and you can sit in the lounge and control the PC with the remote, sweet! No fan noise and all the music/TV shows/downloaded films and TV shows you can watch.
Also check out myhtpc for windows for a highly customisable, TV friendly front end.

Maybe it wouldn't make as much sense if you are truely building from scratch, but this is slashdot. How many peeps here don't have a basement/closet full of spare parts. If you have a box sitting around, it's much cheaper than say a replayTV or MCE Windoze box. Part of building your own is the fun. Aside from that, you can cusomize your own box a lot more than a tivo or replaytv. Mame anyone? Check out MythTV for a cool OSS project or MyHtpc.net for a really cool, community driven front-end. For an all around informative site about hardware, and mostly windows frontend software, check out ruel.net It's more tweaking and screwing around, but more adaptable too.

On a windows system, I've tried a few different solutions for the software. Snapstream and Showshifter are pretty good. The best front end I've found was Myhtpc.net
It's a freeware project with a great community of support. You have to tinker with it more and use some third party apps, but you can cusomize anything (weather, news, mame...) Another great source of info on PRV systems is at Ruel.net

I built my own PVR last year, but even with MyHTPC it failed the spouse test badly. So when I saw those $150 ReplayTVs for sale in Radio Shack I pounced on them. I bought two. At $150 they deliver amazingly good MPEG-2 capture so for the same price as a PVR-250 I get free guide and streaming.

Contrary to the experiences described in this article, my ReplayTVs work flawlessly. Plugged in to the home network, DHCP served them up IPs, they downloaded their info and updated their software. They use uPnP to auto-discover other ReplayTVs on the network and integrate them very well in their on-screen UI.

In fact the UI is a big win - it passes the spouse test easily. Browsing material on the base machine, from another ReplayTV, or from the PC file server is takes a single button push. The ReplayTVs handle program contention intelligently, offering to offload a conflicted recording slot to a "spare" ReplayTV on the network.

The clever Java program DVArchive uses uPnP to imitate a ReplayTV and enables you to upload, stream, or move recorded content from the auto-discovered ReplayTVs. In effect, each ReplayTV acts like a big, external MPEG-2 capture card with lots of ports and functionality.

All ReplayTVs on the network can, of course, stream from any DVArchive-equipped file server to any ReplayTV.

You can even schedule DVArchive to automatically grab recorded material from the ReplayTVs on a batch basis, providing an easy way to create large archives. I have set up some watched folders where new material gets automatically batch encoded to MPEG-4 (xvid) for archiving.

There's a big user community associated with DVArchive.

All in all I am very satisfied with my ReplayTV setup. It is totally integrated into my home media setup (1 TB RAID-5 file server) and works effortlessly. The ReplayTVs automatically skip adverts (works pretty well) and there's an active between ReplayTV units. Useful if you want to pick up a season half-way through.

I avoided Tivo, partly because of cost, but mainly because of its incipient DRM. I was afraid I would have to expend significant effort to create a spouse-friendly PVR system but thankfully my networked ReplayTVs have obviated this requirement for a while.

NOTE: This is not intended to be a troll or a TiVo slam! I'm sincerely interested in /. opinion.

There are two clear (and in my opinion superior) alternatives to TiVo currently creeping into TiVo's market share:

1. In the less-features-but-easier-to-use department, cable companies (such as mine) are offering a service they're calling "TV On Demand." With my digital cable remote (and no phone connection, and no extra service charge) I can play many shows from the recent lineup at will. And pause them, rewind them, fast forward, etc. And of course my digital cable comes with a much faster, cleaner program guide user interface. Now the downside is that the guide is somewhat lacking in features, as compared to TiVo's offering. I can't search it and it doesn't have any intelligence for making suggestions or auto-scheduling.

2. Which brings me to the second alternative. I also have an ATI AIW 9600 Pro TV tuner card in a PC. This PC is hooked to my TV. I run myHTPC for the guide/scheduling/recording features, an ATI's new Easylook UI for actual TV viewing. The two work together seemlessly. This gives me *all* the features of TiVo (except season passes, big whoop), plus a whole lot more. And I don't pay a monthly service charge.

Which brings me to my question: isn't TiVo just a niche product that really should only be used by folks with an antenna feed or analog cable feed who don't have the savvy to set up a PC next to their TV? Isn't its current success due largely to clever marketing and a small window of market opportunity that they've now artificially prolonged? That is, I think there was an argument for TiVo back when it was introduced, but isn't that argument substantially weaker today?

I've got the AIW 9600 Pro. Works great. No propblems. Great for games too. I'm not a big gamer, but I really like Call of Duty, which is pretty demanding graphically. Runs great on the 9600.

The only caveat is that ATI's software, while it is improving, isn't that great. Most significantly their on-screen guide software (GuidePlus) sucks. Thank goodness for myHTPC. Works great. Cool-ass guide UI. And it transparently integrates with ATI's new EasyLook TV UI.

I know, I should be using linux but hey, I want to play games too. (not flamebait, just the truth).

Anyway, I have an old windows box in my spare room with an ATI Radeon 8500 all in wonder. Its an ok card for games but it has one killer feature for this sort of thing - an RF remote. It means that I can leave the beige box in the spare room, run AV cables under the floor to the telly in the living room, and conrtol the PC from the living room with the RF remote, sweeeet!

As an aside, although the drivers for ATI tv cards are getting better, they are still not great for controlling the PC from a telly in the next room. I would thoroughly recommend a freeware (not open source, sorry) proggy called myhtpc its fully customisable, well supported by the author, and has xmltv support. Definately worth a look if you want to stick to windys.

I have many of my CDs ripped onto my hard drive for playing on my HTPC setup. I own the original CD for every single file, and never have a situation where the same file is used on more than one system simultaneously, and yet I'm all of a sudden a criminal. Thanks guys.

Also very popular is freevo. And for windows there is myhtpc.

For Windows, check out myHTPC... I've been playing with that for some time. Its got a good community, getting ready for a second generation, and works well with my older ATI all-in wonder! Quite a fun thing to do, and my wife appreciates the outcome!

When I built my carpc this was my main concern. After a few failed attempts at making windows useable on a 7" LCD I found this little gem. Couple that beautiful, customizable interface with something like an IRman , or my personal favorite the ATI Remote Wonder and you've got yourself something very useable, even on the interstate.

The other alternative is a touch screen LCD with the myHTPC or similar software, but thats when this little toy starts to hurt my wallet.

I chose it over MythTV to avoid a lot of the problems I had trying to do a linux version (finding drivers, configuring, getting it to work well on a slow system...) Plus you have the added bonus of being able to use windows games/emulators on it, and it's easier to use legacy-type hardware like the gamepad I have.

xmltv for open source listings. Read about it here.

Works with the front end of your choice (a few suggestions)

Linux:
MythTV.
Freevo.

Windows:
SageTV.
MyHTPC.

Also, LOTS of good reading at the Home Theater Forums (the Linux forum is embedded under that link).

All of the above systems allow you to use on-screen listings, search for programs by schedule, name, category, etc. They learn favorites and do everything tivo does, best I've been able to tell.

I've been a Tivo user for a year and a half now. Couldn't live without it - until I get my HTPC set up and running the DVR for me on my home network. Just got the green light from my fiancee for that summer project.

Ok I'll try to answer, and I'm not "picking" either.

I have Dish Network and I use their PVR because 1. It was free. 2. No monthly fee. 3. It was free. Why did you go with DirecTV over Dish?

Now, why I built my own was for fun. I had tons of computer parts lying around, and I wanted to see how these worked. I installed FreeVo and MythTV on a Linux box, then took it apart and built it as a windows box running MyHTPC which I like a lot better.

I think some people are into doing things themselves, and if they have the parts/money then why not try it? Worst case they'll go out and buy a tivo if they don't like it. Others are fine with just using the pre-packaged stuff.

I still use my DishPVR because of simplicity, but I use my MediaPC for file storage, image display, DiVX movies, jukebox mp3s, and internet radio.

Or for those stuck on windows, www.myhtpc.net. It's easy fast and works great with all your MSWin(tm) hardware. I use it with an Athlon 800 on Win98SE with an IrMan from evation.com and it runs everything i throw at it just fine. It even has Project64 integrated into it, so i can just use my remote to start my N64 games. Great picture viewing options too, metadata support so you can add info to movies and music, and xmltv support. All without the hassle of a linux setup.

I'm currently using an old gateway p200 desktop case we had in our storage room(pics and specs below).
Software i found and love is myHTPC.net

My personal HTPC site

Thanks for the link, I'll check that out.

Right now I'm using showshifter for my media box, and I like it, but I really like the looks of myHTPC, and the price is right.

Have you been using it for long? How convoluted is the set-up. Do you have to manually add the info for those pretty screenshots, or is their a flawless interface with IMDB databases? In short, whats the user experience like?

..and I never knew that Bob Marley did the soundtrack to pulp fiction.. Any idea why those songs and album info dont match in this screenshot?

Play videos, MP3s, view the weather, XMLtv guide information, launch emulators like MAME and any others (see the forum for myGames), view visualization plugins with Winamp or Windows Media Player 9, launch executables, write your own plugins... view your MP3s by cover art, your games by screen shot, control it with a remote or a gamepad... (find a joy2key program in the forums to use a gamepad for now.)

Really, just check out the screen shots on the homepage. It's only been around for a few months and new releases come fast and furious thanks to Pablo's hard work. It is basically "like XP Media Center Edition, but better, and free." (as in beer, for now.)

sheephead