shortcut3d wrote:So my endeavor into HTPC started with the desire to get a better experience than the cable company box. The criteria I set in 2011 was more simultaneous recordings, more storage, EPG, whole home DVR and compact form factor.
Great thread. I was an old-time TiVo user (had a couple of standard-def Philips units, and later two TiVo HD series 3 units). I, my wife, and daughter, all loved the TiVo user interface and remote. Transferring a show from one TiVo HD to another was bearable (a bit of a time delay before you could start watching it a show in a different room). I never bought into the lifetime subscription, because I always felt confident that newer, better, cheaper technology would come out a year later. But a year later, I'd find myself still preferring the TiVo experience to the competition at the time. Then, I still wouldn't buy lifetime, because I figured, "well, now I've already spent $X/month for the past year, and *surely* something better will come out a year from now).
I moved a couple of times and my daughter got older. I decided that I'd really like to have a TiVo in one or two more rooms of my house. I found a couple of clearance deals on TiVo HD units (e.g., Blockbuster selling them for $100), so a grabbed them but kept hemming and hawing about whether I wanted to pay the extra $X/month (and buying lifetime for 2-4 boxes seemed like an awful lot of money). Around that time, I was also increasingly intrigued by the possibility of playing back my content on my mobile devices (currently, we're pretty entrenched in the iOS ecosystem, though over the last year I've thought about switching my phone to something else). At that time, you could transfer shows off of your TiVo to a computer, and then convert the shows to a mobile-friendly format, but that seemed too time consuming. Transferring shows over the network took quite a while.
I think around that time is when the first cablecard tuners were coming out, too. And I had a Vista w/Media Center PC lying around, so I figured I'd try that out. If it worked well, I would save the time of transferring shows off of the TiVo to a computer, since the TV show files would already be on the computer. Then, I'd just need to factor in the time of the converting the shows to a mobile-friendly format (e.g., using Handbrake or whatever tools at the time could work with Media Center files). I still wasn't quite sure what I was going to do about the other rooms in my house. I'm sure the XBox 360 was out, but I think they were still a little pricey. But they were probably cheaper than trying to put TiVo's in multiple rooms, once you accounted for the lifetime or monthly costs.
My initial experiment with the Vista PC wasn't great. I got a hold of an OTA/ClearQAM tuner, and experimented with that, but channel changing was slow. Then, I had a freak electrical problem at the house and one of my TiVo HD's got fried. Around that time, the SiliconDust HDHomeRun PRIME was out (or coming out really soon), and I decided to go all-in. I bought a new (refurb) HP tower for about $500 with Windows 7 and an HDHomeRun PRIME, and it was around this time of year (2 years ago, I think), and I think I was able to score an XBox 360 Arcade for $99 from Target as part of a holiday sale. Over the next year I would end up buying a 2nd HDHomeRun PRIME when it went on sale (though I've still yet to take it out of the box) and a couple of XBox 360 Slims (purchased last year at holiday time - again for about $100-150).
Over the past year I've become increasingly obsessed with the idea of playing back my content on my iPhone / iPad, even though I honestly don't have a frequent need to do that (crazy). It's been like the holy grail, because it all seems just barely out of reach. I've used Plex Media Server, and combined with the iOS app, it does a wonderful job of playing back recorded shows, but it can't do live TV (or recordings that are still-in-progress). Again, trying to get that to work through all sorts of experiments has become like a quest for the holy grail. Meanwhile, over this past year, I've moved my movie theater into my living room (could never get my wife or daughter to want to go up to the loft to watch movies). That eliminated the need for one extra room. And my daughter's room was another complexity: It was going to be difficult to run ethernet to her room, and you really need that for the XBox 360 to serve as a capable extender. I also kept going back and forth with whether having her have her own TV in her room was such a great idea (school grades fluctuating up and down). She's adapted, though, and seems to prefer watching Netflix on her iPhone. So, potentially another room in the house that doesn't need an extender.
So that brings me to the present. We now only *really* need two dedicated TV rooms but do want to have the ability to stream to mobile devices (ideally, including live TV). And, similar to how one of my TiVo HD's got fried 2 years ago, pushing me to try WMC, my WMC server has started to be a bit more flakey the last few months. There's also always been semi-frequent "tuner not found" errors, and such. Also, sometimes I turn on the TV and WMC looks like it's in a window (non-full-res) and I have to close the WMC app, and restart it. I've been successful at training my wife how to handle that, and she hasn't complained much. But now I'm seeing the TiVo Roamio with the ability to stream live TV to mobile devices, and with me only really needing two rooms, I'm intrigued.
Oh, and over the past year, I got an email offer from TiVo telling me I could add lifetime to my now-defunct TiVo HD for $99. So I decided to do that (thinking that, at worst, I could possibly eBay it for a profit). So, I could really get away with just adding one Roamio Basic ($100-150 with price match and Best Buy $50 gift card) + Stream ($99), or one Roamio Plus ($350 after Best Buy gift card), plus the $400 lifetime, and I could get by with my already lifetimed TiVo HD for a 2nd room.
So, after doing a lot of new research over the past week, that's where I'm at. But with the long holiday weekend, I decided I'd cool my jets a bit, and I installed a bunch of Windows service packs, etc. and am going to play around with a few more things, to see if I can minimize the Windows issues I've had. Meanwhile, I keep posting in the Plex forums with my recommendations for how they could hopefully improve the live TV experience. See my threads here:
Super-easy enhancement: DVR & [pseudo] Live TV support for *ALL* clients
And if you are a PlexPass member, this thread is in the private forums:
Super-easy enhancement: DVR & [pseudo] Live TV support for *ALL* clients
