I’ve been a long time user of GB-PVR and one of the very useful things it features is a web gui. This means that you can check on your recordings anywhere on your home LAN or even be watching a program and be scheduling something you just saw an ad for. I also much prefer the viewing interface of GB-PVR, my vision isn’t horrid, but I spend a lot of time squinting at the menus from 8-10 feet away on a 32″ TV with media center, whereas GB-PVR has much higher contrast menus and larger fonts that are far easier to read. The only reason for me to go to media center is to support cableCard tuners which is what the Ceton card I have ordered is.
I have had several recordings with media center fall afoul of a bug where consecutive shows on the SAME channel will run up to the cutoff time and then immediately cut to the next program, whereas if the shows had been on different channels, they would have had the 5, 10, or 15 minute trailers. GB PVR always gave the bumper and didn’t force you to have 10 minute trailers to get to the “X minutes” rather than “X minutes where possible”. The big issue here is that you can very easily miss the end or begining of one of the shows. Also, being forced to have an extra 10 minutes of HD video (when 3-5 would have done the job) isn’t very conducive to conservation of disk space, oh well.
Back to the web GUI portion, I have run across a product (free) called Remote Potato which provides a Silverlight web interface to provide some of the same scheduling interface and recording access for management that I was able to do with the GB PVR web GUI, but with Media Center was being forced to interrupt recordings in order to monkey with schedules or to review what was scheduled. I haven’t been using it very long, but it looks like a promising tool for bridging the gap on a missing piece of the puzzle.
Well, looks like a lot of folks are hedging their bets by ordering from more than one vendor, so while I initally ordered from Cannon PC, I have now added an order from Fluid Digital, in hopes that I’ll get at least one of these toys before Christmas. I do eventually hope to have one in each of my PVRs so I might as well get on the list since it could be a few months
So I got my new Intel micro ATX board in yesterday for my PVR upgrade. Got everything installed, loaded up 7 Ultimate, everything going fine, except I keep jumping because the BIOS beep is really LOUD! Unfortunately, I’ve been everywhere in the BIOS screens no dice on volume adjustments and the speaker is soldered into the MB so can’t just take it off. So I asked myself, WWMD (what would MacGyver do?) So remembering how I have had beeper gizmos that were nearly muted simply by putting a finger over their face, I got out a roll of electrical tape. I made a sandwich of about 6 layers of tape, cut down to a diameter about the size of a dime and placed it over the top, covering the 2mm opening on the top of the MB’s speaker. After rebooting, the beep was much softer and still does the job of letting you know it’s booting, but not obnoxiously.
So now that the clock is ticking on digial cable, I ordered a Ceton card. I had heard about them months ago but the manufacturer kept a “Preorder” message on their page so I had been back-burnering it, as my 6 Hauppauge tuner cards in 2 PVR systems with GBPVR have been working just fine for me. I have now found out that the card was actually released back in April or May, but severely backordered due to component problems. Aparently only folks who ordered 5+ months ago are starting to get their cards, so it looks like I’ll be in for a bit of a wait. So even ordering now, it could be months before I get my card. BOOOO!
So I was looking at the specs for the Ceton quad tuner I’m looking to get - it says it’s about 6.5″. This is going to be a problem with my micro ATX system I have been running for the last 2.5 years in the bedroom with a Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L . I just barely got an HVR-2250 in the PCI-e slot not being used by the video card, and the HVR-1800 I tried to put in there would not fit – the RAM was in the way. So I am ordering a slight upgrade to deal with this. I have ordered a MB/CPU/RAM bundle with an Intel BOXDG41KR which also has onboard HDMI which will go very nicely into my Sony Bravia TV. It also looks like both the PCI-e 16x and PCI-e 1x slots will run clear of the RAM slots, YAY! and I don’t even have to get a video card to get TV out!
Well, we knew it was going to happen eventually, but finally we have a date. Comcast Nashville has finally said when the switch to fully encrypted digital cable will happen, September 29th. This means that even my new TV from just a few months ago that was digital capable will no longer be able to pick up anything other than the local network TV unless I get digital tuners. So I’m going to have to get one of those Ceton InfiniTV 4 cards to keep my PVR going and adopt Media Center 7.
I remember when I was a kid and my dad split the cable where it came into the house and ran a line to another room and made a big fuss over not telling anyone because we were supposed to pay per outlet. Having to have a tuner from the cable company on each tuner you use is performing an end run on the FCC reg that disallowed charging per outlet. Considering that until they recently dropped CNN HD and TBS HD from the clear QAM (non-encrypted digital), my TV worked just fine with digital cable, there is no reason for them to force folks to use these digital decoders except where the subscriber has only analog TVs – same as when the digital broadcast changeover happened a few years ago. I can absulutely understand having to have some sort of decrypter for premium channels like HBO or Showtime, but TNT or USA??? Get real!
|
|
RSS