[tluxon]

Since it appears our Replays aren't going HD anytime soon and lack some of the versatility they could have, you might want to check out this article on PCMag.com:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,,1669909,00.asp


Tim

 

[jmaver]

BeyondTV is what I went with. The multituner support is fantastic, although I miss the Auto Commercial Skip and the Category support of my old 4000's.

The other downside is that you end up needing a client per tv anyway.

 

[lucindrea]

beyondtv's all in one soultion isnt bad for the price ( and no lifetime sub price either ) .. personaly i like that at a later time you can add $13 to the licence , a second vid card and can record 2 shows at once, somthing not possable with any of the PVR's out their.

 

[plyons10]

Quote:

Originally posted by lucindrea beyondtv's all in one soultion isnt bad for the price ( and no lifetime sub price either ) .. personaly i like that at a later time you can add $13 to the licence , a second vid card and can record 2 shows at once, somthing not possable with any of the PVR's out their.

Not true... the DirecTivo's have had this capability for a while.

 

[Jeffwa]

Quote:

Originally posted by lucindrea beyondtv's all in one soultion isnt bad for the price ( and no lifetime sub price either ) .. personaly i like that at a later time you can add $13 to the licence , a second vid card and can record 2 shows at once, somthing not possable with any of the PVR's out their.

I'm pretty sure some of the cable company PVRs have dual tuners for recording 2 shows at the same time, too.

 

[rm -rf *.*]

Quote:

Originally posted by plyons10 Not true... the DirecTivo's have had this capability for a while.

Wasn't there a "gotcha" with that ability though? Something like one show has to be via the internal DirecTV sat. tuner and the other via the RF-tuner or line-in? Or something to that effect - I don't own one & have never used one so I'm not exactly sure what the "gotcha" was with that, but I do recall hearing about a limitation on that ability... (or was it that it could record one show while viewing another live channel via a different input - so long as the record was only the sat. tuner... *hummm* someone with one please comment - I'm rather curious now... TIA)

 

[moyekj]

Yes there are many dual tuner HD PVRs out there from cable companies now. Motorola alone has at least 2 models released and in use. They are capable of recording 2 HD shows at once while playing back a pre-recorded HD show, and of course can also handle all the SD digital shows plus dual analog channel encoding as well.

 

[Ed Rempalski]

The BeyondTV can handle many tuners, over 8!


It's not HD, but the recorded video is very good, and makes excellent DVD ready material. I use it exclusively now for recording anything that I plan to keep.


It's a very solid product.

 

[Paul Bruneau]

Quote:

Originally posted by rm -rf *.* Wasn't there a "gotcha" with that ability though? Something like one show has to be via the internal DirecTV sat. tuner and the other via the RF-tuner or line-in?

No. On the units I have seen, there is no way to record something from an external input. To provide that function, the DVR would have to encode the mpeg which it is not built to do--the way it is able to record two streams at once is because they are already encoded as they come down from the satellite, so the device has no mpeg encoder at all. Maybe that was the "gotcha"

 

[rochurch]

Anybody had luck with Windows Media Center? I tried loading it (from my MSDN subscription), but I am getting a message that a TV Tuner is not found. I think I remember seeing somewhere that you had to have a MPEG2 Encoder card to get it to work. Is this correct?

 

[rm -rf *.*]

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul Bruneau No. On the units I have seen, there is no way to record something from an external input. To provide that function, the DVR would have to encode the mpeg which it is not built to do--the way it is able to record two streams at once is because they are already encoded as they come down from the satellite, so the device has no mpeg encoder at all. Maybe that was the "gotcha"

Thanks Paul.


That might have been the "Gotcha" that I was thinking of - but after reading your explanation of how the dual tuner configuration of the DTivo is implemented w/o an MPEG encoder - I now realize that I was mixing up and merging some features of another model Tivo into what I thought was the DTivo. About 3 years ago a then colleague was telling me about his new "Pioneer Elite DVD Recorder w/ HardDisk and integrated Tivo DVR" (I guess it was either a DVR-57H or whatever it's predecessor was at the time, if it had one...) - I don't know if he described it wrong, or I heard it wrong, or I remembered it wrong - but somehow I thought that that what he was describing had a DirecTV Access card in it and ... well, you get the general idea of how I somehow had added an "Analog Line-IN" to the DTivo... Sooo *shrug* I'm not too sure that that vague "gotcha" that I was thinking of even exists in this dimension...


Thanks again - and now I have an idea why DirecTV is giving away the DTivo's to new subscribers for $50/each (or less) - it's just two satellite tuners (which they'll happily give any new customer 3 or 4 of the "traditional" design for free...) , and IDE interface and a 40-80Gb HDD - no expensive encoder chip package in there or having to pay even more expensive software guys to create the necessary magic to use the encoder...

 

[lucindrea]

multiple tuners HAS to have hardware mpeg encodeing , that or you would need a qual cpu board heh

 

[waynethedvrguy]

Quote:

Originally posted by jmaver BeyondTV is what I went with. The multituner support is fantastic, although I miss the Auto Commercial Skip and the Category support of my old 4000's. The other downside is that you end up needing a client per tv anyway.

Maybe Ken Blackney can get ReVuE to offer playback support for BeyondTV. It does a great job with RTV files. Just a thought.


Regards,


Wayne

 

[Jamy]

Quote:

Originally posted by rm -rf *.* Wasn't there a "gotcha" with that ability though? Something like one show has to be via the internal DirecTV sat. tuner and the other via the RF-tuner or line-in? Or something to that effect - I don't own one & have never used one so I'm not exactly sure what the "gotcha" was with that, but I do recall hearing about a limitation on that ability... (or was it that it could record one show while viewing another live channel via a different input - so long as the record was only the sat. tuner... *hummm* someone with one please comment - I'm rather curious now... TIA)

Absolutely not the case. The directivo has two directv tuners, you can record two shows, one on each tuner and watch a third recorded show, or record one while watching another. The one you are watching live even retains the ability to be paused/buffered. The old UltimateTV directv boxes had this capability too.

 

[duckman360]

There is talk on the xbox media center forums about adding support for beyond tv as well. That could bring down the cost for "client" machines.


I like beyond, mythtv, freevo, etc...


But I still love my replay/dtivo/xbox combination.


CP