Your PVR

Tell me about your Personal Video Recorder and why you went with that particular solution.

If you don't have one, what kind would you like. If you do have one, which one.

Examples:

"I got a TiVo--it's an easy turnkey solution and I love it."

"I have a Hauppauge PVR 350 plugged into my spare PC in my living room. I like it, but the video fills up the hard drive very fast and the thing is a bit noisy for my living room."

A little bumpage here...


Nobody doing anything with this "convergence" of PC and TV that Bill Gates is talking about?

You couldn't really care less about a PVR?

Right now I am using a hughes DirectTV Tivo PVR. The main reason that I went with this solution was the dual tuner capabilities (record 2 channels simultaneously) and no problematic IR blaster for changing channels (since the directTV tuner and the tivo box are 1 in the same).

A normal Tivo (non directTV) is also great and I would recommend it to just about anybody. There is alot of great software out there now though and its not that big of a deal to build your own PVR. You would have to pry my dual tuners from my cold, dead hands though

If you really need a PVR, you're already watching too much TV.

ThePerfectCore said:

If you really need a PVR, you're already watching too much TV.

Click to expand...

I really disagree with this. I, for one, watch very very little television. Id say there are, 3? maybe 4? shows that I watch. However, most of these shows are on when I sleep or am working. So in turn, odds are, I wouldnt be able to watch the shows I do want to watch.
So... I watch too much TV?
No offense meant, but you might want to think of other possiblities before you claim something like that.

As for what PVR, I am pretty sure that it was you that I had PM'd on this so I wont go into too much detail.

However, I will say that the Winfast/Leadtek is the best Ive ever had. (Granted out of 2 dont have much of a basis to pick from...) lol

TV LEADTEK WINFAST "DELUXE" TV2000XP TV/FM MULTIMEDIA CARD - RETAIL BOX
The 2nd one down, its price has dropped to 49 from 51.

Without a doubt, great card.

I have a leadtek winfast deluxe 2000xp and i LOVE IT. The quality is superb in full screen, it gets a little flaky in half screen and all that stuff but i guess full screen changes the res to 640x480. IT is very easy to use but it has one fault. The drivers that come on the cd crashed my comp 8 times because i had DX9a so i had to go to their site and get all the stuff and i cant use alot of the free programs that came with the card. No matter its good

IFMU said:

TV LEADTEK WINFAST "DELUXE" TV2000XP TV/FM MULTIMEDIA CARD - RETAIL BOX
The 2nd one down, its price has dropped to 49 from 51.

Without a doubt, great card.

Click to expand...

Agreed. The record quality is fantastic and it works on even slower machines (Duron or Celeron based rigs).

I currently have this card in my PC and when I move away from home to go to college I'll probably just watch TV on my PC. I currently use it for digitizing recorded tapes or DVDs so I can watch them at friends houses, when I'm away on trips, or when I'm in the school computer labs with nothing better to do. This card is very easy to setup.

And if your hard drive space is limited, most TV capture cards can be configured to record directly to DivX5 format. at 200kbps video quality and MP3 sound, 30minutes of VCR-quality video will only take 100mb. At lower compression rates I can fit 18 30min episodes on one CD-R.
And if you want to clip out the commercials that can easily be done with Virtualdub.

TiVo does have quirks, but it's the automation that really gets you hooked. All you have to do is select the shows and it does the rest. All the shows I like to watch are scheduled at inconvenient times.

I can't remember the URL for the freeware alternative PVR OS...

ThePerfectCore said:

If you really need a PVR, you're already watching too much TV.

Click to expand...

Actually I don't think this is true. With a PVR I find that I don't sit around watching any old garbage anymore. I only watch the stuff that I want to watch, since I always have a big list of stuff that I enjoy to pick from. There are sometimes when ya just wanna sit on the couch and veg and its amazing the stupid stuff we watch when we feel like that and nothing good is on

"I can't remember the URL for the freeware alternative PVR OS..."
If you mean Linux, http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ .