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ditching cable once and for all....building a media center pc
J_K_M_A_N:
When I canceled my cable and phone I bought a Tivo. It was good but I missed HD. So this weekend I traded the regular Tivo in for a HD Tivo. I did that because I found out it has a tuner for over the air HD. I have to say, I am now a big fan of Tivo. The HD is perfect. I was able to tune ALL of the HD channels for my area. The other box I had using the same antenna would only get about half of them. It has two inputs. One for cable and one for over the air.
I would highly recommend one. I am saving $104 a month from cable and phone being dropped so the Tivo and a 1 year subscription will be paid for in about 4 months.
The other cool thing is you can stream movies from netflix. I may switch from Blockbuster to Netflix just to check that out.
Just wanted to mention that in case anyone was looking into getting one.
J_K_M_A_N
richms:
Overscan is a problem with displays, not the computers driving them.
Newer LCDs seem sweet as to give a perfect 1:1 mapping in their native resolution, older ones were hell with it going thru stretching/scaling etc making it blury crap before hitting the panel.
Graphics cards dont seem to want to do 24fps output when I have tried it, 1080p50 and 1080p60 work fine, but I am yet to find a player that will change the rate according to the FPS of what is being played - not an issue for you in the states where tv is all 60 field/frame anyway, but hell over here with 50/25 for tv and most other stuff being 60 or 24, neither of which play well when the output is set to 60.
H.264 accerleation on most graphics cards now makes stutter a thing of the past, but there are some "aquired" files that dont actually meet the profiles as defined in the standards that will not play properly on a hardware accelerated system like a graphics card or popcorn hour, but it seems the "scene" has got their crap together with making complient files now.
windows 7 is excelent for its support for tuners and stuff now. With a cheap nvidia 8600 doing acceleration and windows 7 being free to try at the moment its well worth a shot doing a htpc IMO.
DrumAnBass:
Be sure to check out Boxee - getting a lot of buzz for being a killer HTPC app; http://www.boxee.tv/
Personally, I am loving my modded original Xbox's running XBMC. I have a full on HTPC but find the XBOX's can't be beat for playing content. All the HTPC front ends I have tried blow compared to XBMC - which has been ported to windows but still isn't as clean and simple as XBMC. http://xbmc.org/
Haven't tried using my HTPC as a DVR however; still using a HD DVR from the cable company for that. It is rock solid, no fuss no hassle... Except for that nasty cable bill every month ;-)
stace:
I use XBMC on a few xbox's around the house and I don't think anything can touch it, in terms of useability. I will say though, that the hardware is getting old and isn't really supported (certainly not after it's modded).
I'm getting on the 'popcorn hour' wagon until something better comes along :applaud:
I have tried the htpc route; Windows, in whatever capacity (inc 7 although better than it was), doesn't have WAF. Don't blow a fortune until you've tested the software in situ, its not a simple solution. Its full of tweaks (even if you use good software like theatretek, etc).......You may be very dissapointed, irrelevant of how much you are saving a month.
Its amazing that no-one has offered an 'out of the box' solution that provides something similar to an xbmc frontend with dvr, etc built in!?
Good luck with your choice :)
J_K_M_A_N:
I can turn mine on with a remote. :)
J_K_M_A_N
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