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Suggestions for HTPC Whole House PVR setup

post #1 of 4
4/9/12 at 10:43pm
Thread Starter 
I am looking to build a whole house PVR setup and I need some guidance / suggestions.

My main goal is to have one central system that will record TV shows and be able to stream the recorded content to any of the TVs in my house. I am thinking of either Myth TV or Windows 7 Media Center with 3+ tuners with cable M-card (I have been looking at HD HomeRun Prime) since it looks to work with Linux or windows.

As a test system, I have MediaTomb installed on a linux system with a number of home movies installed in .m4v format. I have a popcorn hour A100 and an LG Blue-ray player that work great as extenders to play the contents at two TVs. I am just missing the capability to record and I need to buy a couple of additional extenders to connect to additional TVs.

The MediaTomb system is very old and I have no problem replacing with either an Off The Shelf or custom system. I just want to make sure the OTS system has the power that I need.

I have read that I should have at one core for each tuner so I will need a quad core.


HTPC -
OTS - need suggestions
DIY Build - need suggestions

tuners -
HD HomeRun PRIME

media extenders
Popcorn Hour
LG Blue-Ray player
any other suggestions?

I currently have TimeWarner DVR but it has only two tuners. I also have 3 ReplayTV systems that just stopped working. The TW DVR is fine except for storage space and only having two tuners.


Any suggestions
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post #2 of 4
4/10/12 at 6:38am
WMC and Xboxes at each TV would work. The nice thing with this combined with HDHomeRun is that you don't actually need an HTPC located centrally. I'm putting this together myself at the moment. The setup is:

- HDHomeRun, 5.1 receiver, xbox1 at central location. The receiver feeds a living room 5.1 setup via monoprice HDMI over Cat5e extender, USB over Cat5e and HotLink XL IR over Cat5e.
- Xbox2 and a TV in sitting room
- powerful home office PC with WMC to host PVR and media library.

Everything connected via gigabit network. Xbox WMC interface controls everything.
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post #3 of 4
4/11/12 at 12:21am
Thread Starter 
Well, I guess I need to rethink things a little. I was planning on my LG Blu-ray player as my WMC extender but I guess it isn't compatible. I know there are some that are, but I was hoping to do this fairly cheap and reuse what I had. Is there a cheap WMC Extender out there that anyone can suggest?

My LG Blu-Ray works great with MediaTomb so I may go a more standard DLNA media server if there is such a thing.
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post #4 of 4
4/11/12 at 6:43am
As I've been doing my research I've come to the conclusion that the xbox is the way to go if you want DVR capabilities on the remote PC. For just streaming video from a shared media hub you have a lot more options (like popcorn hour). You only need the cheapest xbox and you may be able to find one used, even with a broken optical drive or something.

If you can find a different option to use as a WMC extender, it doesn't have to be as fully featured as the xbox to still be useable. For example, if it didn't have backwards control to use WMC as a DVR, you could do this separately with a smartphone/tablet app that can control your PC. I'm not aware of any other hardware options though.

To sum that up, the 3 things I want are:

1. Watch recorded movies / TV from central media PC: many options to do this

2. Watch live TV from HDHomeRun on TV: need WMC extender of which xbox seems the most capable

3. Control WMC DVR functions: again xbox can do this but there are other options like the splashtop software and tablet app.

Does anyone else have thoughts/suggestions on this?

Edit: The upcoming Ceton Echo may have the answers to all our needs but there is no pricing info yet. I highly doubt it will be cheaper than the $200 Xbox 360 S 4GB.
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