What's the point of an HTPC if you have a DVR?

P

Pretzel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2006
Messages
266
I'm using timewarner cable and have the Scientific Atlantic 8300 HD DVR.
My setup consists of Viewsonic 37" LCD, Upconverting Samsung DVD player, and Panasonic SA-XR57 7.1 HDMI Receiver.

I pay a few extra bucks a month and can record all my content including HD material on the DVR (160gb). I can even add an external harddrive if I want to increase the capacity.

So with that said why build an HTPC?? I'm just wondering if I'm missing the point?

I ask because I've upgraded my primary rig (Core 2 6600, 7950GX 2, Dell 2407 LCD) so much that I have enough parts to make a secondary computer to hookup to my Viewsonic 37" LCD TV.

Secondary Parts: AMD 64 3200, ECS MOBO, Geforce 6800 AGP, 120gb HD & samsung dvd burner. I plan on hooking up my secondary computer and adding a wireless internet card and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard. I'm pretty much setting it up for no reason other than just to have it. Is there anything practical I could be using this for other than a little websurfing?

fyi, will probably run Vista on this as I don't see a point of buying another XP copy at this point.
 
the point is to get rid of the STB DVR and have control over your content. Every STB PVR I've ever dealt with has some level of DRM built in that controls commercial skipping, how long you can keep the content, how many times you can watch recorded content, etc.

With a homebrew PVR, you're in control over your content (at least with the open source ones) -- you keep your media for as long as you want and can transcode it to any format you want/need.

Plus, homebrew PVR's can do many things that STB's cannot. My MythTV PVR is a central media hub for our entire house -- it has all of our movies (ripped to VIDEO_TS), recorded shows, music, and pictures on it. Anyone in our household can easily stream that media to wherever they happen to be. Plus, I've got lots of emulators and ROMs, so it's a nice entertainment machine (MAME, SNES, Genesis, etc) when friends and family come over.

I could go on, but that's enough right there.
 
I've also never seens a STB that can scale and clean a picture as good as ffdshow...right now i could give two shits about the recording (although...I did record a couple games of the world series in HD on mine), I use it for the superior picture quality you can get for DVD's and other content.

Why pay a bunch of money for an upscaling this or upscaling that when i can just use my last rig and add a couple tuner cards to it :p pay about $200 for a couple tuner cards and you're set for everything.
 
Pretzel said:
I'm using timewarner cable and have the Scientific Atlantic 8300 HD DVR.
My setup consists of Viewsonic 37" LCD, Upconverting Samsung DVD player, and Panasonic SA-XR57 7.1 HDMI Receiver.

I pay a few extra bucks a month and can record all my content including HD material on the DVR (160gb). I can even add an external harddrive if I want to increase the capacity.

So with that said why build an HTPC?? I'm just wondering if I'm missing the point?
Click to expand...
In your case you're not really missing anything with an HTPC that your DVR doesn't already do.... for TV.

What you are missing out on is everything else an HTPC does, PVR is just a small part of the puzzle. It can manage your music collection; it's a "highend" upscaling DVD player (which tends to beat out dedicated upscalers costing much more) as well as being able to play back all sorts of other video content (I watch a lot of anime so this is what I primarily watch on mine) as well as being able to do some gaming depending on the hardware used (this isn't really that big of a deal though). Theres also home automation and pretty much whatever you want to do with the system.

You don't have to build an HTPC to PVR TV shows, thats just kind of stupid. You build an HTPC to manage and display your media on your TV. Like I said earlier, PVRing is just a small part of the puzzle.
 
also you can burn content to a DVD and play it anywhere... in the car on a plane...

also i stream live tv with ORB.com to my girlfriend in socal where she goes to college and doesnt have cable tv.

also i can watch TV or any movie i have recorded or ripped on my PDA anywhere with wifi...

the posibilites are endless with a PC and they are very limited with a STB DVR.

I also cut out all commercials on my recorder tv programs...

DVRs and TIVOs are great for normal people but they arnt [H]ard worthy
 
Buying setup devices for all the things that my HTPC does, would cost me a bundle of money. I would also have to deal with endless cables.

My HTPC hooks up to a projector via DVI and speakers via Toshlink and that's all.

I game, surf, manage and listen to music, TV, DVDs, Pictures, backup DVDs, use as spare machine, etc. Best of all, the machine was built using spare parts that I could only get $300-400 for if I were to sell.
 
Control . . Control . . . Control . . . .

The ability to archive stuff. The ability to get HD shows/movies, UNCOMPRESSED ( at least with regard to the dvr compressing stuff ).

Harddrives are alot easier to add in a standard pc.


Quality . . . Quality . . . Quality . . .

I'll go out on a limb and say that NO DVR to date can do the tricks that purevideo/avivo can.


And the reason that started it ALL for me.

How many DVR's have you had that can play:
All the formats that you can find on the web? x264, divx, xvid, wmhd, blah blah.
 
Everyone's seen a TIVO by now.

But when they come over and see my HTPC in action, they're absolutely amazed. And rightfully so. A well-built and implemented HTPC is awe-inspiring.
 
Pretzel said:
I'm using timewarner cable and have the Scientific Atlantic 8300 HD DVR.
My setup consists of Viewsonic 37" LCD, Upconverting Samsung DVD player, and Panasonic SA-XR57 7.1 HDMI Receiver.

I pay a few extra bucks a month and can record all my content including HD material on the DVR (160gb). I can even add an external harddrive if I want to increase the capacity.

So with that said why build an HTPC?? I'm just wondering if I'm missing the point?

I ask because I've upgraded my primary rig (Core 2 6600, 7950GX 2, Dell 2407 LCD) so much that I have enough parts to make a secondary computer to hookup to my Viewsonic 37" LCD TV.

Secondary Parts: AMD 64 3200, ECS MOBO, Geforce 6800 AGP, 120gb HD & samsung dvd burner. I plan on hooking up my secondary computer and adding a wireless internet card and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard. I'm pretty much setting it up for no reason other than just to have it. Is there anything practical I could be using this for other than a little websurfing?

fyi, will probably run Vista on this as I don't see a point of buying another XP copy at this point.
Click to expand...
One word!!!! Convergence. HTPC's are still in their infancy stage but they are a great convergance device.

With a HTPC you can replace your dvd player, DVR (endless disc space with pc based DVR), mp3 player, cd player/changer, dvd changer, upscaling dvd player, photo veiwer, ect...

There are so so many things that you can do with a HTPC is just awesome. over a year ago when i first go into htpc, I mainly used is as an upscaling dvd player, then I bought MCE, and my life changed, I've got 5 tuenrs, three HD, 2 SD, and 1TB of disc space, I've basically got an endless amount of DVRing, I can basically record and save every single episode of every show I dvr. You can even backup and archive your DVR'd shows, can't do that with your cable co DVR.

then just little things like being able to have family over and pull up the latest video's or pictures of your 4 month old daughter and do it easily is a huge benefit for me, the wife absolutely loves this feature.

Then games, used to be a huge PC gamer, behing able to go back to old favorite games and playing them on a 106" screen is just unreal.

so again really the HTPC is a convergance device and once more and more ppl realize what they can do I forsee more and more ppl moving towards them. I think I've even got my 49 year old dad convinced on getting one.

- Josh
 
geek street cred, being able to convert the recording to whatever format you like (or even just record them in the format you want), control (there are some nifty apps that use IR blasters or serial ports to control your cable box), the ability to stream recorded content to other PC's in your home, less DRM headaches, expandability (ability to add more than one TV card to a single HTPC, wider variety of HD options), potentially unlimited capacity to playback nearly any digital recording standard, and the sheer joy of doing it all yourself... just to name a few.
 
Isn't it best to have both if you don't get much over the air signals? No HD recording out of a cable box keeps me from throwing one together. You can firewire it out of a TiVo or 8300 on to a computer though.
 
Forgive my newbieness, but I this texuspete00 has a good point.

From what I understand, if you are like many of us and have a digital cable box and that is how you primarily source your channels, then you have no choice but to control it with an IR blaster or serial port connection and then record from the analog output.

For those doing that right now, is there significant degradation of the video quality by the digital > analog > digital conversion?
 
well, I dunno about anyone else but the output from my digital cable box (it was some motorola box from Charter) was only an S-Video connection. So the quality was the same no matter where it went (and the quality was in fact *shit* IMO).
 
he46570 said:
Forgive my newbieness, but I this texuspete00 has a good point.

From what I understand, if you are like many of us and have a digital cable box and that is how you primarily source your channels, then you have no choice but to control it with an IR blaster or serial port connection and then record from the analog output.

For those doing that right now, is there significant degradation of the video quality by the digital > analog > digital conversion?
Click to expand...
I have two SD digital cable box's, hooked up to two Avermedia Purity 250 tuner cards. I run MCE 2005, and use that to control the box's.

I get excelent quality, I'd say better than doing SD channels directly to my projector. What I like is that I can DVR any and all the SD channels, but whats evern better is I use the HTPC to upscale all the SD channels from cable, and then feed 720p the native rez of my projector.

So yes the only disadvantage is, is the HD material, but being able to upscale SD material is a huge advantage to me as I watch more SD than I do HD.

- Josh
 
I have been unable to get acceptable picture quality out of my HTPC for live or recorded cable TV. I'm using a happauge MCE-150. It was passable when I had a 27in crt, but now that I have a 40in LCD, the picture quality is unwatchable. Comparing the cable plugged into just the TV with the cable plugged into the HTPC was a night and day difference. With the 8300HD from time warner, I cannot tell the difference between recorded and live, and it records 5.1 audio. I really only use my HTPC for XVID's and the picture quality with those (HD or DVD rips) is excellent.
 
clague said:
I have been unable to get acceptable picture quality out of my HTPC for live or recorded cable TV. I'm using a happauge MCE-150. It was passable when I had a 27in crt, but now that I have a 40in LCD, the picture quality is unwatchable. Comparing the cable plugged into just the TV with the cable plugged into the HTPC was a night and day difference. With the 8300HD from time warner, I cannot tell the difference between recorded and live, and it records 5.1 audio. I really only use my HTPC for XVID's and the picture quality with those (HD or DVD rips) is excellent.
Click to expand...

Well you can't expect standard definition TV to look great on a large high resolution screen. When you have an HTPC set up CORRECTLY then maybe you can make a fair comparison.

Back on topic, some people like things they can just take out the box, plug in, and never touch again. Others prefer spending hours fiddling to get everything working just the way they like it and having the freedom to do what they want. HTPC's just give you more freedom. They're more cutting edge, are easier to expand, and just allow you to do more. If all you want to do is record and watch TV then by all means get a DVR, but HTPC's are more about centralizing your digital media than recording TV.
 
i'll play devil's advocate and give a reason not to get one, ease of use. ive had my htpc for a good year now and i love it, but it doesn't work out of the box. you're gonna have to tweak, and break and retweak to good the kind of performance enthusiasts get. after working 8 hours and going to school at night, the last thing i wanna do is have to "fix" my tv.

besides that tho, everything everyone else says kinda makes it worth it if u have the time
 
clague said:
I have been unable to get acceptable picture quality out of my HTPC for live or recorded cable TV. I'm using a happauge MCE-150. It was passable when I had a 27in crt, but now that I have a 40in LCD, the picture quality is unwatchable. Comparing the cable plugged into just the TV with the cable plugged into the HTPC was a night and day difference. With the 8300HD from time warner, I cannot tell the difference between recorded and live, and it records 5.1 audio. I really only use my HTPC for XVID's and the picture quality with those (HD or DVD rips) is excellent.
Click to expand...

LCD is not good for SD.
 
You can't record HD off cable with a homebuilt DVR. Stick with your SA8300HD, buy a super-cheap used xbox1 (not 360), soft-mod it, and install xbox media center. XBMC lets you stream movies in any codec (yes including xvid) from a SMB mount on your local network, streams music (mp3, aac, FLAC, you name it), upscales DVDs, plays movies from utube, gets the weather, etc. And it costs under $100, and hey, it plays xbox1 games too. Oh, and it outputs HD and has enough horsepower to playback those HR.HDTV 960x540 resolution TV rips with a high quality pixel shader.

Everybody should have a xbox media center. You will be AMAZED by the use you can get out of a used xbox. It's the best hundred bucks you'll ever spend.
 
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