November 07, 2004

Cheapest PC for PVR?

I'd like to assemble a dedicated PVR out of a PC, and have already purchased Beyond TV and a Hauppage 250 card for this. Unlike many people who want to do this kind of project though, I do not already have an old PC that I can use as my base system. I also don't have deep pockets, so I would like to purchase the cheapest new PC I can get that will do the job.

(Provisos and parameters: 1) I know I could get a dirt cheap system used, but I want to be covered by a warrantee. 2) I don't want to fuss around with buying a bunch of cheap parts individually that may not work well together. I'm aiming for high reliability and don't want to waste a lot of time. 3) I don't need to fit the thing in my stereo cabinet, so I don't need a HTPC-style case.)

I've been surfing around awhile and this seems like a pretty hard challenge. Most current PCs are made with gaming in mind. They have much faster processors than you really need for a PVR that uses hardware encoding, so they may run hot and require a noisy fan (bad). They often come bundled with stuff you don't need for a PVR (speakers, printers), but lack what would be desirable in a PVR system (e.g. a really HUGE hard disk, lots of PCI slots to add additional tuner cards, etc).

Can PVRBloggers recommend manufacturers/retailers that fill the bill?

Oh -- one last wrinkle. I have to be able to buy it in Canada.
-- Kevin O'Neill

November 7, 2004 in Home Theater PC, media servers | Permalink | Answers (4) | TrackBack

October 13, 2004

Quality of HDTV Xvids on XBMC?

I am thinking of getting an XBox just to get XBMC up and running. The XBMC FAQ and pretty much anything I've managed to google, say that XBMC can pipe out HDTV-quality picture only theoretically and that in practice the base XBox CPU is far too slow to decode an HDTV stream without jitter and dropped frames. Well, my question is this to those of you out there that do have XBMC installed: I don't get care about receiving HDTV itself, but I do download HDTV files from the 'net that are encoded in Xvid, DivX, etc. Does XBMC choke on those as well, or do they display OK?
-- costas

October 13, 2004 in media servers, Xbox | Permalink | Answers (19) | TrackBack

October 11, 2004

Connected DVD Players

Whatever became of the connected/wireless DVD players announced in January from Linksys and D-Link? Did these products get abandoned? I thought that these devices would be the most likely to get the wireless side of the equation right which seems pretty important if you want to stream video over a wireless network.

In the absence of those devices, is the Gateway Connected DVD player the best of the crop (vs. GoVideo, etc.) for streaming video over a 802.11g network?
-- Ryan

October 11, 2004 in Home Theater, media servers, Networking | Permalink | Answers (3) | TrackBack