Dedicated Recording HTPC

[JSylvia007]

Howdy all! First time poster here on TGB, but I've been an avid user of MCE since "XP" all the way up now to Windows 7.

My question is this...

I have built a great "back office" HTPC in a server closet in my house. It powers my main TV and has 2 Ceton InfiniTV 4 USB tuners with CableCards hooked up for a total of 8 tuners. It also has a RAID 5 array in it for a total of 3TB of storage for recorded content, separate from an SSD system drive.

In other rooms throughout the house I have Intel Atom-based PCs on the back of all the TVs, and they use the Ceton Tuner through the network.

What I have done is map each one of the 4 tuners on InfiniTV-1 to be the actual TVs for TV watching purposes, and left the 4 other tuners on the main television for tv watching and recording.

Everything is working great, with one exception. Ideally, I'd like to be able to hit "RECORD" on ANY of the remote TVs and have the MAIN box do the actual recording through one of the 4 dedicated tuners that it has. Is anyone aware of this type of setup? All MediaPC boxes are Windows 7 Ultimate.

Any help would be appreciated.

[adam1991]

You're almost there.

But what you need to do is scrap your remote PCs, and replace them with extenders. Then simply re-do your tuner setup so that all of them are available to the main HTPC.

Voila.

You could keep your remote PCs for whatever purpose you want; simply add extenders to the mix, and use them as second sources on your TV.

[JSylvia007]

I didn't even THINK of that. Are you aware of extenders that are small enough to fit on a VESA mount on the back of a TV??

edit: What functionality would I lose by going to an extender. I know that I would lose most of the "Windows" features, but, would Netflix and MyMovies (program to manage videos on NAS devices) still work? Also, do I have to worry about CODEC support on the Extender?

[newfiend]

Google Ceton Echo...

Sent from my SGH-i937 using Board Express

[bmblank]

My movies works great on extenders. It doesn't install on the extender, but just shares the main htpcs library. I don't think there is a Netflix app for mc yet, but I'm sure there are back doors to make it work on extenders.

[adam1991]

I didn't even THINK of that. Are you aware of extenders that are small enough to fit on a VESA mount on the back of a TV??

edit: What functionality would I lose by going to an extender. I know that I would lose most of the "Windows" features, but, would Netflix and MyMovies (program to manage videos on NAS devices) still work? Also, do I have to worry about CODEC support on the Extender?

Extenders don't extend the native Media Center Netflix app. Plus, depending on how your movies are encoded, you may have to worry about CODECs some. Search the board; this has been discussed at some length.

But as I said, you could simply use the extender as one source to the TV, while keeping the current PC as another input source to the TV.

The Ceton Echo, coming out soon, will meet your need for "out of the way" extender. 4in x 4in x 0.8in, it'll sit anywhere you want. Its support for anything beyond standard Windows Media Center extender functionality is not yet known in the wild. There's much hope and speculation that it will do more than an XBox in that regard.

[JSylvia007]

Ceton is an excellent company, and I will continue to use their products. Thanks for all the info. It's greatly appreciated.