Re: TV Cards

[Bruno Prior <bruno@xxxxxxx>]

Given the frustrations of trying to get anything like this working, I'd be
tempted by a Tivo, but, quite apart from the availability issues at the
moment, I have one major reservation. Perhaps someone could suggest a way
to
deal with it.

My reservation is this: I am setting the house up to have no conventional
TVs - all "non-live" A/V will be distributed like any other data
over Cat.5
and ethernet to silent PCs (diskless workstations using drakTermServ) with
flat screens in each room (plasma in the main room, LCDs elsewhere). The
intention is for all recordings (and ripped DVDs, CDs etc.) to be stored on
the server(s) so that they can be played back anywhere independently. I
have
also put in coax to most rooms, so I can watch or record live TV and radio
in any room with a tuner (built into the screen, on a separate box like the
PlayTV Box, or using a tuner card in the workstation). The intention was to
do this on the cheap with things like the Nova-T, but as you say, the Tivo
is probably superior. But if I use Tivos, I still want to be able to
control
recording from any room and playback to any room. I have seen a little
about
the TurboNet for Tivo, but this seems to focus on receiving programming
data
over the LAN. Does it also allow you to NFS mount the server arrays so Tivo
can record to them instead of its internal disk? Or is there some
alternative mechanism to record to a remote server? And is there a linux
interface to allow me to control the Tivo over the network (presumably the
worst case would be to ssh or telnet into the Tivo)?

I have not cabled up for IR control signal distribution or Kat.5 for
distribution of the A/V signal, and I am certainly not going down the route
of RF distribution of the video signal, so I am looking for an
ethernet/TCP/IP solution.

Can I build Tivos into my network, or should I stick with the tuner cards
(the Nova-T is just about working now, after all)? And of course, there is
always the issue of cost. Given that I will have PCs in each room anyway,
tuner cards for several of them will be cheaper than a small bank of Tivos,
and more flexible and less space-consuming.

Cheers,

Bruno


Ian Lowe wrote:
> Yeah, I wne thtrough a bunch of PC/TV solutions, looking for the
"always
> in-line" options.. and they are all pretty crappy, tbh. After
seeing a Tivo,
> (and much persuasion from Jenni) we settled on that approach, and
would now
> never go back..
>
> I wonder if some sort of dedicated overlay kit would do a batter job,
but I
> think that the PC based video output systems are simply being
manufactured
> down to a price, rather than up to a quality, and those of us with
plasmas
> or projectors (who I guess are a little more sensitive to video
quality
> because of the scale) will always spot the difference.
>
> A decent PC -> Video system is well up my list of cool toys to look
for!
>
> Ian.