Huddled Masses

I’ve been looking at building myself a mega-media-center PC. Maybe a Linux MythTV, or Windows Vista MCE, or whatever, I haven’t really decided yet. Right now we have 3 or 4 VCRs hooked up in various rooms, and my wife tends to use a couple of them to record shows each night while we watch shows from the day before in the living room… it’s getting old. We’re constantly having problems with VCRs dying, tapes that won’t stop flipping, and so-on. So I’ve decided it’s time to go to digital recorders, but I have lots of questions.

If I bought a pair of dual-tuner TiVo boxes, they could share stuff recorded between them, but then I’m tied into a subscription? How much would that cost? I looked at Neuros OSD boxes earlier but they only have a single tuner each, so that’s a little overpriced compared to that TiVo, but it might be good for “the other rooms” if I decide to build a full PC DVR.

We actually have cable (digital cable, even), which is piped into all these different rooms in our house … and we actively watch it in at least two of those rooms (even when we don’t have guests). We also record a lot of shows —sometimes three at once— so I can’t just upgrade our Time Warner cable to include a DVR subscription. I’m thinking about building a digital video recording computer (DVRc) with multiple tuners.

The first problem is all the splitters. The signal in our house right now goes through two splitters before it gets to my digital set-top box (STB) in the living room (one to shunt a signal to the rest of the house, and one for the cable modem). Because we have a VCR in there which is sometimes used to record, we have the STB hooked up through the VCR which means that I loose the bi-directional features like “On Demand” and “Start Over.” To hook up a new multi-tuner DVR, I’ll have to add yet another (4-way) splitter! So obviously this is a problem. I think I need a boosted cable splitter (like the one on the right here) to be able to get a strong enough signal, but I don’t know, and I’m reluctant to spend this much money without being sure it will work. I need the bi-directional cable box to work, and I need the cable modem to still work. Do I need to split them off separately, and then amp the rest? Or will this thing from Amazon let them work through the splitter?

Lets assume I build a DVR PC, and I need to play video off the DVR computer to TVs in other rooms. I either need the TiVO or Neuros OSD that I mentioned earlier, or I need a Modulator like the one in the side bar (there are much cheaper versions that just merge one input to Channel 3 or 4) or, perhaps a diplexer would work. Really, the modulator seems like the perfect trick though. And would let me add more features later. There’s a huge price difference though … I need to make sure I’m not wasting my money

But I also have some questions about tuners. Hauppauge makes some awesome tuners, including the WINTV-HVR-2250 dual-tuner (for $108) But I can get a single-tuner Hardware KWorld TV Tuner for about $32 shipped, or a software one for about $20, so I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the extra to upgrade to PCIe, to get two tuners on a single card (which might let me build a “Mini” system instead of a full ATX box). I don’t know if the digital tuner is worth the extra cash (will our Digital Cable from Time Warner have enough unencrypted QAM channels to make it worth it?

Sigh. So many choices to make. And now my server’s main HD is dead, so I don’t have the free spare hardware I thought I had to build this system with. Maybe I’ll just wait for Black Friday and see what I can get on sale…

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