It has been years since I've been on this site, and I don't have much free time to do the research so I apologize in advance.
Basically I'm ready to dump cable (uverse) mostly because of cost, but I'm also on my 4th DVR in 5 years...
What I'd like to do is basically get/make a media center that can DVR OTA network shows, play back my movies (ripped and downloaded) and get played back on any of my 3 other TVs throughout the house.
I understand that besides my "main" media center that will probably live in the basement, I'll need some kind of client machines/boxes at each TV. My questions are, is there a good all in one hardware and software package, or am I better off building a machine with good video processing, a capture card, and a huge hard drive? What software would I get?
The second half of the puzzle is what do I use for the clients? As was mentioned I've done very little research, but would like to avoid Apple products as we are an android house and I prefer to keep that trend going if it matters. Every room in the house has Cat 5 run to it, so networking them back to the main media center is no problem. I'm willing to spend a bit to make this happen since I'll re-coop that cost by dropping cable.
To maybe complicate things more, I'd like all the clients to be able to access Netflix, amazon instant, etc as that's how I plan to supliment the missing cable shows we like now. Am I just crazy or can you guys help me out and at least point me in the right directions? Thanks!