TiVo versus PC-based solutions: PC Mag.

"jack ak" wrote in message
...
On 4/11/04 8:12 PM, in article
, "RichG"
wrote:

Regarding your comment:

" Having said that, I put a $5 salvage FM tuner card in a 400mHz
workstation that I use for timeshifting BBC/NPR programming:
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/radio/
"

Does a reasonably priced card exist that would record AM stations, as
well
as FM stations??? Thanks RichG



Try using a portable AM radio near the computer you want to have a tuner
card. AM radios are susceptible to RF interference from computers and
CRTs.
AM radio tuner cards are likely not available for this reason.


Wow, I forgot about that problem... I remember visiting my brother at a
university computer center in the '60s where he loaded a deck of Hollerith
cards into the reader, set an AM radio on top of an IBM 1620 processing unit
and hit "run". I can't remember the song, but the computer played it as
modulated RF into the AM radio!

So I imagine that even in these high tech times, a tuner card (AM or
otherwise) would be more RF resistant than your average radio...

Ack

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 at 18:13 GMT, wrote:

Try using a portable AM radio near the computer you want to have a tuner
card. AM radios are susceptible to RF interference from computers and CRTs.
AM radio tuner cards are likely not available for this reason.

There are a few USB FM tuners out there, and I'd think that'd be the
answer for AM, also. But no one makes one AFAIK.




--
L.V.X., brother mouse
http://www.mousetrap.net/otr/ Old Time Radio trades
http://makeashorterlink.com/?K16312E06 CBS Radio Mystery Theater database
http://greyhound.mousetrap.net/altus/ retired racing dog

off to look for TV tuner cards...

You might want to take a look at this page:
http://www.snapstream.com/Products/P...ompatiblecards

The only caveat with going with MPEG hardware compression is that you can't
stream live tv to another computer.

I got their bundle: Beyond TV 3 and Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 Kit (PCI)
179.99$

In article ,
ack wrote:
Also, why tie up the resources of a 1000 dollar-plus PC to do something a 99
dollar (okay, $99 - $400) box can do better on a 24/7 schedule?

The one response I have is to this part.. do you really need a $1K PC?

Won't this work on the dirt cheap no name PCs you see advertized everywhere?

I'm not arguing it's anywhere near a Tivo, just the price argument..
(Though some of the things I see people trying to do to make multi-tuner
PC PVRs are very intriguing..)

Matt:

I am sort of a purist when it comes to video. It's my broadcast career, I
guess.

You could get by with something cheaper. But if you do, be prepared to make
absolutely SURE the PC you are planning to use/buy for these products meets
or exceeds the hardware requirements for reliable operation as indicated on
the packaging or in and product description that is available.

No matter what you do with these products they, the review says, will not
perform to the video quality standards of just about any consumer PVR/DVR
currently available, no matter how much - or little - money you spend.

Also, if for some reason you buy the what appears to be the right hardware
and it does not work, you get to figure out what is wrong -- why it does not
work reliable or at all. It's like you are the lucky guinea pig in this
grand experiment of PC-based DVRs

The quote of $1000 was on the low end of a spectrum I deal with at my job.
We recently re-built a custom graphics playback PVR for our newscasts using
recycled 6-year-old DPS PVR 2500 capture/playback PCI cards in a $1700 Dell
Pentium 4 with 512 MB of memory and "dumbed down" from Windows 2000 to NT
4.0 SP6. The original system was a PII with 128MB memory. It and the DPS
hardware cost $5500 when we put the system into service. BTW, I wrote the
playback software using VB APIs developed by DPS.

Trying to be factual because I have "been there, done that, didn't get a
t-shirt" I remain


Ack


"Matt Ackeret" wrote in message
...
In article ,
ack wrote:
Also, why tie up the resources of a 1000 dollar-plus PC to do something a
99
dollar (okay, $99 - $400) box can do better on a 24/7 schedule?

The one response I have is to this part.. do you really need a $1K PC?

Won't this work on the dirt cheap no name PCs you see advertized
everywhere?

I'm not arguing it's anywhere near a Tivo, just the price argument..
(Though some of the things I see people trying to do to make multi-tuner
PC PVRs are very intriguing..)

I got their bundle: Beyond TV 3 and Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 Kit (PCI)
179.99$

While the service is free, this will be a competitor with the Tivo as
their quality improves. I'm looking into it for my relatives in Canada
whom Tivo doesn't wish to provide service to. (The tivocanada hacks are
a pain.)

They claim it needs a 600mhz PC, which seems doable. The key here is
that such PCs are effectively "free" for many people, anybody who
upgrades computers on any sort of regular basis.

Also intresting to see would be good support for networked drives. I
would like to keep the drives on a server in another room, and the
box by the TV would have no drives or fan ideally.
--
Visit Burning Man 1999 in my photojournals
http://www.templetons.com/brad/photo/bman99

On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 01:04:21 -0000, (Brad
Templeton) wrote:

I got their bundle: Beyond TV 3 and Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 Kit (PCI)
179.99$

While the service is free, this will be a competitor with the Tivo as
their quality improves. I'm looking into it for my relatives in Canada
whom Tivo doesn't wish to provide service to. (The tivocanada hacks are
a pain.)

They claim it needs a 600mhz PC, which seems doable. The key here is
that such PCs are effectively "free" for many people, anybody who
upgrades computers on any sort of regular basis.

Also intresting to see would be good support for networked drives. I
would like to keep the drives on a server in another room, and the
box by the TV would have no drives or fan ideally.

Not sure about BeyondTV but SageTV can work wth networked drives,
provided you have the correct permissions set up.
Both packages have clients. There are some reqs for both clients.
Right now Beyond's limitation with a client is it won't work with
tuner cards that do hardware encoding. Not so with Sage.


Stuart

In article ,
Lagartija wrote:
On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 01:04:21 -0000, (Brad
Templeton) wrote:

Not sure about BeyondTV but SageTV can work wth networked drives,
provided you have the correct permissions set up.
Both packages have clients. There are some reqs for both clients.
Right now Beyond's limitation with a client is it won't work with
tuner cards that do hardware encoding. Not so with Sage.

What do you mean by "clients". Since BTV runs on Windows, can't you
just say that "T:" is a network drive and tell BTV or any other tool
to use that as their drive? Then, with a bit of luck, Windows
will eventually spin down the boot drive (don't know if it's easy
to make a diskless windows workstation or not) to get a quiet
system.

Or by a client do you mean a device that is perhaps for playback
only and diskless? That would be a good arrangement. Feed
the cable into a remote PC somewhere else in the house, with the
disk drives. Then have a diskless, quiet client that only does
playback of the recorded video, and remote control and setup of
the main machine's scheduled recordings. That's actually a better
arrangement -- and possibly slap extra tuner cards in the main
machine as needed.

The playback machine could even be an old laptop with video out, as
many of them have, silent once disk spins down.
--
Will Apes become the first superhumans?
http://www.templetons.com/brad/apes.html

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 05:01:54 -0000, (Brad
Templeton) wrote:

In article ,
Lagartija wrote:
On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 01:04:21 -0000, (Brad
Templeton) wrote:

Not sure about BeyondTV but SageTV can work wth networked drives,
provided you have the correct permissions set up.
Both packages have clients. There are some reqs for both clients.
Right now Beyond's limitation with a client is it won't work with
tuner cards that do hardware encoding. Not so with Sage.

What do you mean by "clients". Since BTV runs on Windows, can't you
just say that "T:" is a network drive and tell BTV or any other tool
to use that as their drive? Then, with a bit of luck, Windows
will eventually spin down the boot drive (don't know if it's easy
to make a diskless windows workstation or not) to get a quiet
system.

Or by a client do you mean a device that is perhaps for playback
only and diskless? That would be a good arrangement. Feed
the cable into a remote PC somewhere else in the house, with the
disk drives. Then have a diskless, quiet client that only does
playback of the recorded video, and remote control and setup of
the main machine's scheduled recordings. That's actually a better
arrangement -- and possibly slap extra tuner cards in the main
machine as needed.

The playback machine could even be an old laptop with video out, as
many of them have, silent once disk spins down.

I've been running Sage for a few months now. The server side of
things is where the video streaming / encoding is taking place. It is
also the machine where I store my "media" files, meaning either
recordings from tv done by Sage that I want to "archive" as well as
any other types of mpeg-2 based recordings, divx, music and pictures.
The server machine has the tuner / capture card in it and is plugged
into my cable box, along with the IR connections to change channels.
The client can be run on any machine. It gives you though the same
Sage interface. It connects to the server to allow you to watch live
tv, set recordings, playback, schedule and so forth on the client.
As far as network drives / folders. As an example, I have multiple
directories on my office system that contains music. I go into setup
on my Sage server and import those directories as music and / or media
directories. The files are not transferred over, but so long as both
machines can talk to each other through typical windows networking, I
can access those files now through the Sage server as well as any
other Sage clients.
I would imagine you could have diskless clients. Just not sure how
that would be set up. Just to clarify that regardless of where you do
your recordings from , meaning whatever client. The actual recording
takes place on the server and is stored there.
One of the nice things about Sage is the ability to support multiple
tuners. I've even heard of some extreme to very extreme setups with
4+ tuner cards.
Hope this helps and clarifys. Let me know if you have any other
questions.

Not sure about BeyondTV but SageTV can work wth networked drives,
provided you have the correct permissions set up.
Both packages have clients. There are some reqs for both clients.
Right now Beyond's limitation with a client is it won't work with
tuner cards that do hardware encoding. Not so with Sage.

Anybody try both Sage and Beyond? I am going to try Sage and see what I
find different about it but I welcome any comments about each.