I am looking for new TV tuner software.

For years I have been using ATI Media Center which has a feature called TV-On-Demand (pause, rewind of OTA tv) which can be turned on or off at will with a mouse click.

I don't use pause or rewind with OTA tv and I don't want my hard drive to be constantly in use generating heat and wearing out the drive uselessly while I watch a OTA tv program.

Is there a way to turn off the constant hard drive use with SageTV while watching a OTA broadcast?

Is there any other TV tuner software product that allows turning off hard drive usage? I can't believe ATI Media Center is the only one.


:confused:

nope, they are all PVR's...

whatchHDTV (http://watchhdtv.net/download.aspx)might support what you want... it did I think when I first tried one of the beta's... don't think its been updated in a while...

but, how much heat & wear and tear does streaming TV to/from the HDD really cause? my 'capture' (or whatever you want to call it) drive is 2 500GB drives in raid 0, haven't had either of them die yet... been in use a couple of years now, one server feeding 2 TV's, so that should be like twice the use/abuse... I am sure they will die eventually, all HDD's will... I think the standard is about 5 years...

nope, they are all PVR's...

[snip]


Thanks for your reply Somewhatlost.

I'm just looking for something where I can just watch tv with a PC tuner card. One reason is my drives will be doing other things and I don't want tv watching to interfere with any other jobs they are doing. TV watching is only to pass the time while waiting.

So it seems then that ATI is the only product where you can just watch tv with nothing else active unless you select it to be on.

Should I post this question in another forum?


:confused:

you could try the AVS HTPC forum, probably get more response there...

You say this proggy does not lay down data to the hard drive? Then how does it pause and rewind??

I think you are mistaken about this.


For years I have been using ATI Media Center which has a feature called TV-On-Demand (pause, rewind of OTA tv) which can be turned on or off at will with a mouse click.
:confused:

Or are you saying you can turn off the disk caching (and loose pause and rewind) with a mouse click?

If all you want to do is stream OTA. Get an HDHomerun and watch live through VLC on your PC. No storage. No rewind, just live TV without the disk thrashing. (Although you might find VLC will fill a buffer or cache because it thinks it's another far way URL - but you can probably set this 0 somehow knowing VLC)

this might be better asked over at the SageTV forums.....

I'm not at home, so I can't study the sage.properties file - sage is VERY configurable.. you may well be able to turn off this functionality from within this file.

IF you can't turn it off, I'm thinking you may be able to re-direct it. You could create a ramdisk (virtual hard drive that uses RAM - not hard disk) to put the temp recording files on while watching tv. Of course - you'd need enough ram to do this.

You may also try pausing a few times... its so nice to hit pause and actually be able to listen to the wife when she wants to talk to you - or you need a beverage - or have to go to the bathroom - or need to check on a crying kid. I don't know how anyone watches TV at all without this functionality.

Lastly - I think your concern about wearing out your hard disk is unfounded... generally a hard disk goes bad because it had a trauma causing the heads to hit the disk, or having the spindle bearings wear out.. moving the heads around on the disk really won't do any damage to the disk.

Thanks for all your replies.

[snip]

Or are you saying you can turn off the disk caching (and loose pause and rewind) with a mouse click?

[snip]

Exactly. One click turns on and off at will the TV-On-Demand features (pause, rewind, etc). If I need it (I never have) I can turn it on; if I don't need it, it's turned off. I have really never needed the pause or rewind because if the phone rings, then I click the 'record' button. Then and only then does the TV program get recorded to the hard drive because then I need it. Phone call over; then I watch the few minutes of the recording in VLC to "catch up" with the program, or I will click the "stop recording at end of program" button to set it to automatically shut off the recording at the program's end and watch the ending sometime later. I suppose I could click on the TV-On-Demand instead of the 'record' but I don't because then I would not have the ability to record the rest of the show and have it automatically shut off if I need to do that. Never needed for sports since the networks always show replays there.

BTW I'm looking at the HDhomerun as a possible buy. But I'm still wondering though if it would work properly with my 10/100 LAN or if I would need to upgrade to a 100/1000 LAN setup. It's because my 10/100 LAN is constantly active most of the time. For example, when I fire up WinAmp to watch streaming TV from the net, the program stutters unless I shut down all current LAN and PC activity. But that could be a bandwidth problem with my 1.5 DSL and not a 10/100 LAN problem. I suppose I'll just have to buy one and try it.

And that brings me to ....

All my PCs are set up to do as much as possible. I like to push their limits for getting things done. I don't have dedicated PCs. No HTPC or Server PC or scientific research PC or gaming PC etc here. Each PC is pushed.

So, while my PCs are busy doing other activities such as downloading decoding folding analysing etc., I need the hard drives free and not slowed down by unwatched but on TV software for all of that. When on, much of the time the TV plays in a small window on the moniter or in Thru-View mode so I can see through the transparant TV picture window to what I'm really working on with the computer. Or the TV window is buried on the desktop. So I need efficient tv software and not "I'm-The-Boss-And-This-Computer-Should-Be-Running-Only-Me" kind of software. And if I hear something that I might want to watch later, it's got to be ready to go to do a quick recording.

this might be better asked over at the SageTV forums.....

I'm not at home, so I can't study the sage.properties file - sage is VERY configurable.. you may well be able to turn off this functionality from within this file.

IF you can't turn it off, I'm thinking you may be able to re-direct it. You could create a ramdisk (virtual hard drive that uses RAM - not hard disk) to put the temp recording files on while watching tv. Of course - you'd need enough ram to do this.

You may also try pausing a few times... its so nice to hit pause and actually be able to listen to the wife when she wants to talk to you - or you need a beverage - or have to go to the bathroom - or need to check on a crying kid. I don't know how anyone watches TV at all without this functionality.

Lastly - I think your concern about wearing out your hard disk is unfounded... generally a hard disk goes bad because it had a trauma causing the heads to hit the disk, or having the spindle bearings wear out.. moving the heads around on the disk really won't do any damage to the disk.

Thanks Teststrips for the tip on the SageTV forums. I'll have to check that out when I get a chance.

SageTV is highly configurable? That sounds good.

I do hear you on the pausing thing, Teststrips. I guess I have to confess, I sort of do pause TV shows. All the shows that I watch (LOST, 24, This Week, etc) are set to automatically record for me to watch later. When I watch them later, I do pause them at times for various reasons while watching.

As far as everything else, I guess I really just want to listen to TV, not watch it.

So, it's not really a wearing out the disk thing ... it's a "the hard drives are busy doing something else and don't need to be slowed down or interupted with a needless unwanted activity" thing.


:cool:

your PC usage is not the 'norm'

I don't think Sage will do what you want, it is highly configurable, but just like all the other PVR app's, it is a PVR first and foremost...

nowadays everyone has gone the whole PVR route where they assume you will have a dedicated HTPC or Media Server box... the watch TV on your monitor while you work thing has mostly passed...

after thinking about this a bit more, I think your best bet would be to go to one of the original TV capture card vendors and get their software that they bundled with the old cards (ie ATI/hauppauge/etc...) back from when the whole TV on you PC was a new concept and they hadn't all jumped on the PVR band wagon yet... I know ATI at least was doing some innovative things with watching TV on your PC... not sure you will find anything much better...

just curious, but I wonder if you could just use a thumb/flash drive as the recording buffer? it would tie up a USB bus, but your HDD's would be unaffected...

as for the HDhomerun and needing 1G Enet, the port on the HDHomerun is only 100M... while I am sure having 1G would be nice all around, it should be a non issue with the HDHomerun...

Sorry I didn't return sooner to update things.

I did get the HDHomerun. Great device. I like having two tuners in one device. Any PC on the LAN can get the HD tuner stream signal. Even my win98se computer gets it and plays it! THAT is amazing! I could not do that before since any tuner card required a 32 bit OS. But over the LAN is a totally different thing. :)

I'm using the included TotalMedia software. It works. It triggers the device over the LAN so I can watch TV. It records only when I tell it to. VLC will also trigger the HDHomerun and play and control the stream from it. VLC is the player software I use on the win98se computer. TotalMedia is fairly basic. I miss the ThruView mode that the ATI software had. Eventually I'll look at other player software again (maybe ... probably).

Nice device ... the HDHomerun. I have the older flat version of it (as compared to the current rounded version of it).


:cool: