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is Windows Media center worth it??
ChadTower:
Not sure on regular Tivo but I know it won't do anything with a DirecTivo.
hulkster:
--- Quote from: leapinlew on August 08, 2007, 11:11:39 am ---
--- Quote from: hulkster on August 07, 2007, 09:48:28 am ---my high end gaming machine i built only cost me $1300.
--- End quote ---
Also...
Tell me how what components make up a "high end" gaming system and only costs $1,300.
--- End quote ---
well this guys comment over on the avs forum basically summed it up for me:
"How badly do you want all this? Are you willing to use a keyboard and mouse at all the tv's or how user friendly does this all have to be? It would be easy enough to connect the pc's to the sdtv's via svideo capable video cards and network them all together to a media server but then you're stuck with not really being able to read text on the sdtv's to properly navigate your media files.
I think you're asking for something that's just not available quite yet , at least not for sdtv and hdtv and user friendliness .
So basically unless you are a tinkering fool like most of us here, maybe you should forget this idea until you have all HDTV's and media extenders are more mature and cheaper."
boykster:
It IS possible to do, but it is relatively expensive to implement properly. I agree that a modded xbox plus XBMC is a great low-cost way to go to get an easy to use STB that you can deploy at multiple tv's. I don't use em, but lots of people do and are happy with the results.
I personally use the comcast HD DVR, and while its no Tivo, its good at what it does - records HD with 2 tuners and lets me watch it whenever I want to. I only pay $5 a month for it, so no hardware investment.
For watching digital media, I use 2 HTPC's that are distributed throughout the house, running a frontend called DVDLobby (built on mainlobby) and a custom backend component that I built. Additionally I use girder for inter-PC communication, and Zoomplayer for dvd / media playback. To control everything I have a custom IR distribution system that I wrote / built. I store all of my media centrally on a couple of linux file servers running RAID5 arrays. Its now a very mature system, but it took several years to really work out all the kinks and get everything so that it's bullet proof stable.
HTPCs are great fun, but the amount of tweaking and configuring can get annoying after a while. I basically have "locked down" my HTPC's now and only experiement every so often, else I spend more time tweaking than actually using them. I also only use my HTPC's to watch movies. That's it. no time-shifting (PVR), music, games, surfing, etc.
there are lots of people who are also happy with MCE...
shmokes:
--- Quote from: ChadTower on August 08, 2007, 12:59:03 pm ---
Not sure on regular Tivo but I know it won't do anything with a DirecTivo.
--- End quote ---
Do the DirectTivos have USB ports on them? The early TIVOs did not have built-in ethernet ports, but there was a USB ethernet adapter you could get for it. That ethernet port was what pushed me to ReplayTV early-on as it had it out of the box, but the adapter for the TIVO cost $100. It's probably practically free on Ebay now, and I would imagine the newer TIVOs have ethernet built-in.
ChadTower:
Series 1 DirecTivos don't have USB or NICs but you could get an addon NIC, which I do have and it's good. I've never seen any software for interfacing anything directly with it, though, as the encoding is different than a standard Tivo. I bought the NIC back when they were still recent and I don't remember it being anywhere near $100. This one wasn't from Tivo, though, it was from a third party.
Series 2 DirecTivos have USB but it is disabled out of the box, IIRC. You have to go in and enable it in the OS, which requires hacking the OS or even loading up a custom version of it.
The main issue with the DirecTivos is that they don't have anything resembling the Home Media software. DirecTV wouldn't allow it - they don't talk to each other, they can't share amongst themselves, and they can't play media from anything else. I would imagine that's the functionality that a regular Tivo would be using to talk to XBMC.
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