Hi, I posted recently to the MCE thread with a specific question, but after much frustration, I've decided to ask a more general question in a new thread.
My wife recently upgraded to a new laptop, and I've decided to use her old one as a simple PVR/streaming media endpoint for my weight room. The TV in my weight room is a simple 4:3 SD-CRT, so nothing that would require heavy horsepower to drive. I'm using Time Warner Cable, but I don't have a set-top box in this room. Instead I've just been hooking the TV straight to the wall with coax.
I just want to have access to a program guide and single receiver recording capabilities that are better than "record this program now" and "record in this time slot every day/week", in other words, something that can subscribe to a series and knows about things like new episodes, duplicate elimination, etc.
The laptop has the following specs:
AMD Turion 64 1.8GHz
1GB RAM
ATI RADEON Mobile Express 200M
S-Video out
Wired 100Mbps ethernet to my home network
MCE remote and USB IR receiver
I've also picked up an AverTV Hybrid Volar MAX USB 2.0 TV tuner, though I've had limited success with it. I've tried installing WinXP MCE 2K5 and Win7 RC on the laptop, and both install and run fine, but TV capture is EXTREMELY choppy under both to the point of being unusable. With the Aver Media Center app, I can watch analog TV (for how much longer, I don't know) pretty smoothly, but it is sapping about 80% of the CPU on that machine to do so, so anytime I do anything the TV signal starts to get choppy as well.
I'm not married to this tuner and will happily return it if there's a better/more efficient USB or PC card tuner out there. Similarly, I'm not married to using a Windows OS if there's a good option such as Linux/MythTV that would work well on this hardware.
The last thing to mention is that I also have a Mac MINI hooked up to my home theater in the living room that's idle most of the time and is connected to the wired home network as well.
Having set things up that way, I'd like to ask if anyone can recommend a combination of a (cheap) TV tuner for this laptop and software configuration using the laptop and/or the Mac MINI to give me the following:
* Solid PVR features on the laptop that perform without choppiness.
* Ability to control the software with my MCE remote control.
* Ability to stream a wide variety of audio/video formats from my NAS.
Right now the AverTV and MCE gives me everything except for the "without choppiness" part, but of course that's probably the most critical piece of the equation.
In a perfect world this solution would be fully installed on the laptop, but I'm fine going the route of a MythTV backend on the Mac MINI (as long as someone can recommend a good USB tuner for that device) and a MythTV frontend (probably Linux-based) on the laptop.
Thoughts? Recommendations? Thanks in advance!
My wife recently upgraded to a new laptop, and I've decided to use her old one as a simple PVR/streaming media endpoint for my weight room. The TV in my weight room is a simple 4:3 SD-CRT, so nothing that would require heavy horsepower to drive. I'm using Time Warner Cable, but I don't have a set-top box in this room. Instead I've just been hooking the TV straight to the wall with coax.
I just want to have access to a program guide and single receiver recording capabilities that are better than "record this program now" and "record in this time slot every day/week", in other words, something that can subscribe to a series and knows about things like new episodes, duplicate elimination, etc.
The laptop has the following specs:
AMD Turion 64 1.8GHz
1GB RAM
ATI RADEON Mobile Express 200M
S-Video out
Wired 100Mbps ethernet to my home network
MCE remote and USB IR receiver
I've also picked up an AverTV Hybrid Volar MAX USB 2.0 TV tuner, though I've had limited success with it. I've tried installing WinXP MCE 2K5 and Win7 RC on the laptop, and both install and run fine, but TV capture is EXTREMELY choppy under both to the point of being unusable. With the Aver Media Center app, I can watch analog TV (for how much longer, I don't know) pretty smoothly, but it is sapping about 80% of the CPU on that machine to do so, so anytime I do anything the TV signal starts to get choppy as well.
I'm not married to this tuner and will happily return it if there's a better/more efficient USB or PC card tuner out there. Similarly, I'm not married to using a Windows OS if there's a good option such as Linux/MythTV that would work well on this hardware.
The last thing to mention is that I also have a Mac MINI hooked up to my home theater in the living room that's idle most of the time and is connected to the wired home network as well.
Having set things up that way, I'd like to ask if anyone can recommend a combination of a (cheap) TV tuner for this laptop and software configuration using the laptop and/or the Mac MINI to give me the following:
* Solid PVR features on the laptop that perform without choppiness.
* Ability to control the software with my MCE remote control.
* Ability to stream a wide variety of audio/video formats from my NAS.
Right now the AverTV and MCE gives me everything except for the "without choppiness" part, but of course that's probably the most critical piece of the equation.
In a perfect world this solution would be fully installed on the laptop, but I'm fine going the route of a MythTV backend on the Mac MINI (as long as someone can recommend a good USB tuner for that device) and a MythTV frontend (probably Linux-based) on the laptop.
Thoughts? Recommendations? Thanks in advance!
