TiVo or HTPC? - Page 2

This is correct, it is entirely dependent on what you want to use them for. When I say 'superior DVR', I'm only talking about the live and recorded TV features, nothing more. Others may value the comskip in WMC or the ease of use of a transcoder like pyTivo for Tivos. Xboxes generally suck for anything other than TV (as an extender) but of course have tons of other features if you're willing to pony up for Live Gold (some of which are poorly done on a Tivo, like YouTube). Tivo has more reliable and better quality guide data, IMO. Yin and yang.

It's all in what you want, neither is superior to the other overall.

You can add keywords to your WL for basketball and football, then make them required as an either/or. Go into the keyword page for the WL, it explains how to do this, but for what you want you'd hit thumbs up twice on each keyword to make them optional. Optional for WLs means 'I want this or this', plus your required 'Florida Gators' phrase.

Your keywords should then be 'Florida Gators', '(basketball)', and '(football)'. You probably want to set it to record first-run only so it won't get old games too, and you'll want to pad the recording by an hour or so.

But be careful here, some games will only show up as 'Georgia vs. Florida' or vice versa. You'll have to check the listings when football starts to see how to keyword it - you might have to drop Gators from your first phrase.

You also have "not" booleans so you can specifically exclude programming, such as "Florida State". It may take a little while to tune the wishlist, but once you do it will be there for the life of the unit and you can just forget about it.

 

I have always been a view/delete kind of guy. But upgrading your TiVo's drive or going HTPC (with or without a NAS) adds enough space who cares if you pick up a few recordings you don't want. Simply delete them. :) Priority wise they should always be the lowest unless you are really set on watching something... then I would schedule it to be sure it got captured. I'm debating if I want to go with four tuners... grabbed another HDHomeRun from Fry's ($55) before the sale was over .

Let me know how that works out for you. I worry that four tuners sending OTA HDTV may put too much a load on the network if it is doing other things that require bandwidth -- streaming, NAS file transfers, etc.

I have one HD Homerun because I wanted the flexibility of being able to watch TV from one of my PC screens when it wasn't being used by my media-PC for recording. If I decide to add additional tuners to my media-PC, I'll buy a Hauppauge tuner card so I don't use up more network bandwidth.

SUBTITLE: Concerned Over Network / LAN Bandwidth...
. .
Task Manager will give you some clues - look at CPU and Network Utilization:
.

• Set the HDHR3 to record 1 show -check the numbers.
  .
• Set the HDHR3 to record 2 shows on 1 PC -check the numbers.
  .
• Set the HDHR3 to record 2 shows and stream 1 show on 1 PC -check the numbers.
  .
• Set the HDHR3 to record 2 shows and stream 2 shows on 1 PC -check the numbers.

.
HDTV bandwidth requirements aren't all that high, AFAICT, on my HTPC. But, with so little ClearQAM to record right now, I won't be sure until CBS, NBC, ABC and NEW or PIX 'Prime Time' new shows need all 4 tuners Mon-Fri. So far, I just recorded ~10-20 minutes of 4 random shows simultaneously and didn't see any problem. There are SO MANY utilities I've found via GOOGLE that I can't wait to 'Experiment' with.

Thanks for starting me off with the Seagate FAT+ ~ 2 years ago!

How would it tax your network? Everything is switched these days so traffic from the HD Homerun would just go to the HTPC, not to every device or flood the network.

Besides, 4 HD streams is less than 80mbps max. With everything gigabit that's 8% utilization.

Unless you were thinking of adding wireless somewhere in which case you should stop. Wireless and HD just don't go together.

You are right, of course. My backbone is GigE, but I was thinking in terms of my particular situation where the feed from the HD Homerun(s) to the media-PC have to go through a pair of PLA's which would be a sub 100 Mbps choke point. It can currently handle 2 feeds without any corruption but probably no more. That is what I was thinking of. I think if I had to put more tuners in the media-PC I would probably co-locate it with the HD Homerun in the basement where it can get a direct antenna feed and share a switch with the tuners. I run it by remote control from my main PC anyway so it can be anywhere in the house.

SUBTITLE: Step #2 of 'The Experiment'...

I just noticed that 2 tuners are currently active:

1. CBS - NCIS
   .
2. ABC - The Middle

.
NetPerSec is showing 22.7Mbps Average Received Rate; Task Manager is showing ~2.25% Network Utilization on a 1 Gig NIC (through a 1 Gig Netgear 5-Port -> 1Gig Trendnet 8-Port -> 100M Linksys 8-Port); Firefox and Process Explorer are using ~15% CPU so these cute little "Dual-Tuner Ethernet Devices" must be streaming a 'Vista WMC DVR-MS Ready' file.

ABC - The Middle ended so CBS - NCIS is averaging 15.0Mbps. I believe I remember reading, maybe from Kelson, that ABC HD quality suffers from too many bits going to the sub-channels.

ABC-1 & ABC-2 run about 7-8Mbps for their 720p feeds. They started this in Jan 2012. Worst case for me would be simultaneously recording CBS-HD and NBC-HD. That combination pulls about 30Mbps in combined bitrate. My bandwidth through the PLA's is good for that -- I've tested it many times this summer in anticipation of the fall schedule.
If you mean the HD Homerun, it is sending a transport stream. WMC will process and store it as a .wtv file. Other DVR software, like NextPVR, will store it as a .ts (transport stream) file. Two nice things about .ts files:
[1] just about all media players will play a .ts file -- probably including your FAT+. I don't know any that will play a .wtv file -- mine certainly don't.
[2] you can stream a .ts file on your media player while it is still recording -- just like with a DVR.

I was playing with that last night. I started recording NBC's Olympic coverage on the media-PC and after about 15 min I started streaming the live .ts file from the NAS through my WD Live-SMP. Have to admit it was pretty cool. Unfortunately the Live-SMP doesn't have a 30 sec skip like the TiVo, but the FF works well enough to get through commercials.
Edited by Kelson - 8/7/12 at 7:01pm

SUBTITLE: ABC HD Quality / Vista vs W7 WMC File Types... {lightbulb}
.

• Quote:

  Originally Posted by Kelson 
  
  ABC-1 & ABC-2 run about 7-8Mbps for their 720p feeds. They started this in Jan 2012. Worst case for me would be simultaneously recording CBS-HD and NBC-HD. That combination pulls about 30Mbps in combined bitrate. My bandwidth through the PLA's is good for that -- I've tested it many times this summer in anticipation of the fall schedule...
  .
  As I posted, when ABC finished, CBS settled in @ 15Mbps. So, if NBC is the same quality, 30Mbps sounds right. {thumbsup}
  .
• Quote:

  Originally Posted by Kelson 
  
  

  Quote:

  Originally Posted by ClearToLand 
  these cute little "Dual-Tuner Ethernet Devices" must be streaming a 'Vista WMC DVR-MS Ready' file

  If you mean the HD Homerun, it is sending a transport stream. WMC will process and store it as a .wtv file. Other DVR software, like NextPVR, will store it as a .ts (transport stream) file. Two nice things about .ts files:
  [1] just about all media players will play a .ts file -- probably including your FAT+. I don't know any that will play a .wtv file -- mine certainly don't.
  [2] you can stream a .ts file on your media player while it is still recording -- just like with a DVR...
  .
  I apparently have been doing more research / GOOGLE'ng than you :
  .
  1. Windows 7 WMC creates .wtv files.
     .
  2. Vista WMC (*BEFORE* some update that I forgot the name of ) creates .dvr-ms files.
     .
  3. Windows 7 has a utility to convert, one-by-one, .wtv files to .dvr-ms files.
     .
  4. My WDTV Live Plus will play my Vista WMC .dvr-ms files (from my HDHDR-USs). And, of course, .TS files (from my PVR-1212).
     .
  5. My Patriot PBO and Patriot CORE will only play (regarding recordings made via my Hauppauge PVR-1212 & SiliconDust HDHR3-USs) the PVR-1212 .TS files
     .
  6. A 'Guru' on the Patriot Box Office (Media Streamer) Forum has written a script that:
     .
     1. Converts .wtv files to .dvr-ms files
        .
     2. Converts .dvr-ms files to DivX files that he then views on "Some Hand-Held Device That I Forgot the Name Of" during his commutes To-and-From Work.
     .
  7. My Seagate FAT+ is currently idle, since both Patriot boxes have 'ReplayTV/TiVo-like Skip & Replay' and the WD box plays the .dvr-ms files.
     .
  8. Again, IIRC, since so much GOOGLE'ng in so little time (at my 'advanced age' ) tends to result in confusion of "Who-Does-What", I believe that a utility (i.e. FFDSHOW; I'm sure there are *MANY* others) will *EASILY* convert a .dvr-ms file into WHATEVER you desire.
     .
  9. If NextPVR will store my HDHR3-US streams as .TS instead of .dvr-ms, that CERTAINLY moves it to the top of my 'Next Experiment' list!
     Thanks again!!!
  .
  Until we meet again...

You can get bitrate information of A/V files using MediaInfo. I also see bitrates directly in my TiVo transfer programs which is why I tend to notice them more often. CBS-HD was historically pristine 1080 HD with no sub-channels and outputting close to 19Mbps. Recently in the Philly market they have implemented a worthless SD sub-channel and reduced their bitrate to ~15Mbps. NBC-HD had a sub-channel to start and has historically output 1080 at ~15Mbps. FOX generally runs 14-15Mbps outputting 720p. Recording any pair-wise combination of those three from the HD Homerun across the PLA's is a worst-case scenario for me -- I've done a lot of it over the summer and my configuration "passes".
Nothing you have written here is inconsistent with what I stated, you just complicated things by introducing Vista-MC and the notion of post-processing a video capture.

I was only talking about .wtv files from Win-7 WMC -- I don't have any Vista PC's. So my statement stands that I don't know of any media players that directly play a .wtv file.

As far as post-processing to convert a fully recorded .wtv file to .dvr-ms or something else, that misses the point I was making about the .ts file -- you can stream a live .ts file with your media player while it is still recording on your media-PC. That makes all the media players in your house into "DVR-extenders". Since the media players I am familiar with don't play .wtv files, you can't do that when recording with Win-7 WMC -- you have to use an Xbox as an extender. If you are interested in post-processing I suggest Video ReDo. VRD reads unprotected WMC files and you can edit/recode/save them to any of the popular open formats. I do a lot of commercial-editing with VRD of both .tivo and .ts files because I collect series I don't have time to watch during the season. VRD is a great tool for this -- I prefer to save the edited recordings as .m2ts files, myself.

I can't remember if you are OTA or cable. What I've written about recording and live-streaming .ts files only applies to the HD Homerun recording OTA or clear-QAM cable. If you have the HD Homerun Prime cable-card model, you have to use WMC because of the cable DRM requirements. NextPVR only supports OTA and clear-QAM on the HD Homerun, not the HD Homerun Prime.

I was not aware the PBO had TiVo-like skip forward & backwards. I will have to look into that, one of those could prove very useful. Thanks for the tip.

Edit: Silly me, you keep citing the HDHR3-US in your post which is the 2-tuner OTA/clear-QAM model that I have. So, yes, NextPVR will work fine with it to record your OTA/cable source as .ts files. The 7-day guide service costs $25/yr but you can get a 2 mo trial subscription for $6. PSIP is worthless as a guide but perfectly useful for experimental recordings.
Edited by Kelson - 8/8/12 at 8:03am

Mr. Nelson,

What's the advantage of saving a video file to the .m2ts file over, say, .ts or .tp files?. Thanks.

I don't know that there is any technical advantage. VRD can save as .ts as well as m2ts. I prefer .m2ts for a couple reasons.

1. I'm used to working with them from all my BluRay ripping.
2. They play very well on my WD Live players -- never an issue.
3. I will on occasion decide to keep some HDTV recordings permanently and will author them to BD-Video. Since .m2ts is the native BluRay file format it saves having to do any file conversions.

Edited by Kelson - 8/9/12 at 9:48am