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I personally use MythTV. The only other option would be Plutohome (for me).
If I had to choose though I would go with media center since you can always customize it more than tivo. Like with my Mythtv box I can stream tv like you can with the slingbox. Im sure they have this for mediacenter too.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." -Benjamin Franklin
Thanks for the feedback; my WMC 2005 should arrive today from Dell. Neoee, any change you can post your MythTV recepie on the board? Are you using Knoppix (KnoppMyth) as your Linux distribution? I’ve heard that MythTV is very temperamental when it comes to hardware and the TV Tuner card must comply or you either get no reception or your recording goes to shit, like 1hr of TV capture takes up 10 Gigs of HD where it should only take 3-4Gig.
Thanks for the feedback; my WMC 2005 should arrive today from Dell. Neoee, any change you can post your MythTV recepie on the board? Are you using Knoppix (KnoppMyth) as your Linux distribution? I?ve heard that MythTV is very temperamental when it comes to hardware and the TV Tuner card must comply or you either get no reception or your recording goes to shit, like 1hr of TV capture takes up 10 Gigs of HD where it should only take 3-4Gig.
Sure. I'm not using Knoppmyth, just running it on Fedora. Knoppmyth is supposed to be really easy to get going. I chose to do it the hard way so I could learn a bit more Linux along the way. It can be a pain in the ass to setup but it really has some kickass features and they are always adding more. Here's the reference I used to get mine going:
I'm using a Asus pundit-r (if I could do it again I would just get the -s model since the video drivers aren't such a pain in the ass) + a happague pvr-500 (dual-tuner), 500gig drive, 512 ram, don't remember how fast of a processor I stuck in it. If you stick with the happague cards you should have no issues. You can also adjust the quality of the recordings so they don't take much space (different codecs). I think typically I'm using about 2.5gigs for an hour.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." -Benjamin Franklin
I got my DELL Windows Media Center 2005 about 3 weeks ago, here's some pointers.
1) You can only by WMC with a pc these days, so be sure that you can get a copy of the OS with the purchase of your machine. Allot of computers these days are coming with the OS on the drive, but no restoration disk.. this is bad because they like to put all of that commercial shit software with the distribution. Dell allows you to have a copy of the OS for $8.
2) It's best if you have a HDTV and signal. I've got a Sony Vega simple Tube and can't really do much when in PC mode, all that I have is an S-Video, RCA and Component connections. The S-Video sucks ass, even WMC looks bad. I ended up using my XBox 360 as an extender device to broadcast TV and recorded TV. Drawback, can't watch DVD's from your PC, you have to watch them from your XBox 360 drive.
3) Get some serious storage ready. An hour program at best quality takes up a little over 2 GB. I'm recording a lot of soccer matches so I've already got 50GB stored.
4) Don't spend too much on the latest machine. If alls you are doing is using the system for a Media Center, 2.5GHz / 1GB RAM is more than enough. In fact, I swapped the Dell WMC machine that I got, took the TV tuner card out and put it in an older Dell SC430 Poweredge Server that I have and loaded WMC onto it and made my new Dell my XP workstation because it was much more powerful and featured than the server.
5) I've also loaded Windows Vista RC1 on another SATA II Drive. If you can hold out until Vista, WAIT! The WMC with Vista is so much better. Menus are better and easier to navigate and the compression is better. I've also noticed an increase in picture quality.
Think it all depends on what you plan to do and what kind of feeling you want to get out of it
if its only playing with movies, egt the tivo, if you want to go deeps into media maanegemnt, go wmc (what i prefer)
tivo is controlled with a remote, the other one is both remote or keyboard.
I got my Dell XPS preinstalled with WMC 2005, still haven't had the time to full around with it too much... however I don't want to use it just to record TV, probably more so for video editing and the like. Thanks for all the info algy, very useful.
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