Questions before purchasing an infiniTV card

[Marvison]

First off some information on myself. I am an avid PC guy for over a decade, working on them both hardware and software side; I am not a programmer however. I have been interested in a HTPC for a long time and think I'm finally ready to pull the trigger but first I have a lot of questions I don't seem to be able to find a straight forward answer for.

My set-up would be a central computer with either the InfiniTV 6/4 PCIe. I would then have 3 TV's in other rooms that I would want to access the central computer with. Now my question is what options do I have to get the signal from my central computer to these other TV's.

From what I've read extenders seem to be everyone's first choice but they seem to be quite cost prohibitive. My DVR's currently cost me around $26 a month, so with the card and 3 extenders I'm looking at rougly $500 bucks. It would be over a year and a half before the investment paid off. Which is acceptable for me just not for my wife.

Is it not possible to run a cable line to each TV? Could I not use the already existing cable lines in my house to distrubute the signal to each TV? I image then I could only change channels on the TV's connected by the cable line, I would have no access to recorded shows nor could I record.

Can you use a chromecast or roku media stick? Can you use another PC that has WMC installed? How well does an xbox 360 actually work as an extender?

Right now my thought process is as follows. Central computer receives and distributes the signal. TV in living room is hooked up to the xbox I already own (provided an xbox works decently well at this). Computer in bedroom is feeding the TV in the bedroom. Laptop will be used for the kids room TV and possibly moved around to accomadate other TV's as the other kids grow up. This would mean I would only need to buy a wifi adapter for my x-box and a new PSU for the computer upstairs.

[TheOsburnFamil]

What "else" do you want to do with the TVs (if anything) beyond just a DVR? Netflix, YouTub, Hulu, Amazon, HBOGO, "other", rip DVDs and/or Blurays, pictures collection, MP3 collection, Streaming Music, etc...etcc..?
Or is truly the only thing you care about is TV?

[mdavej]

You can save about $100 if you buy your tuner used. You can also save if you get Xboxes that have been banned or have bad hard drives. You can sort of make Roku, Chromecast, a second PC work, as well as wired or wireless HDMI. But the results aren't worth it IMO. The interfaces are very clunky or limited by copy protections, etc. Best to bite the bullet and get extenders. Older Linksys extenders also work fine and are fairly cheap. Just add them one at a time over several months to soften the initial cost. Serving 4 TV's, you're saving way more than $26/month, more like $50, most likely.

[choliscott]

First of all, to save some money if you are planning on using the machine strictly for Windows media center, I would connect it directly to one of the TV's that you want to connect (most people will connect it to the main tv)

As far as connecting other TV's, I would look at either Linksys Extenders or Xbox 360's. If you go with Xbox 360, I would look at ones that are either banned from Xbox live or the DVD Drive is broken as these tend to be cheaper. One warning about the Xbox banned though, if you wanted to play other video formats (besides Native WMC files), then the Xbox might require a codec, which requires a free Xbox live acct to download, however not sure which formats trigger the download (besides MP4 H264)

[Marvison]

So an xbox works better than a second PC? With the new generation of consoles out I imagine the market is flooded with Xboxs right now.

It looks like to eth is built to support streaming to multiple PC's would that be a better option for me since I already have many PC's.

Also this HTPC would be run out of my main computer and slowly I would build a box dedicated to an HTPC.

[mdavej]

So an xbox works better than a second PC? With the new generation of consoles out I imagine the market is flooded with Xboxs right now.

It looks like to eth is built to support streaming to multiple PC's would that be a better option for me since I already have many PC's.

Also this HTPC would be run out of my main computer and slowly I would build a box dedicated to an HTPC.

Other PCs won't play copy protected content. What's protected depends on your cable company. Mine protects almost nothing, others protect everything. An extender is also easier to set up and operate. If you don't want to use extenders, there are much cheaper options than PCs as well, like Raspberry Pi and other cheap Android boxes.

Streaming from the ETH applies to live TV only. I don't know about you, but I never actually watch live TV. So while this is a nifty feature, it's ultimately useless if you primarily watch recordings. Of course it would work for the multiple server system you propose, but other PCs still couldn't watch shared recordings that are copy protected.

Many of us have been down this path, trying everything under the sun but an extender in order to save $50, but nothing else works as well. Also consider your time. It takes about 15 minutes to get an extender up and running. How long does it take to build a PC and load all the software? Then you have a big, ugly, noisy box in your bedroom. Then you discover you can't control it, and have to spend another $20 on an IR dongle. So you've really saved nothing and caused yourself a lot of grief and end up with a system full of compromises and limitations. Sure you can't play every file under the sun on an extender, but who cares. Extenders work just fine for live and recorded TV and many types of files and are quite cheap and simple to setup and operate.

[Marvison]

The thing with the PC's is I already have them, they would need a few upgrades but they would be cheap and would of happened anyway. An extender is only an extender, while I'm not saying I wont be getting them it is a shame they are the only option.

I think I may go the x-box route since they seem to be a fairly good extender from what I'm hearing from you guys.

Thanks everyone for the advice!

[barnabas1969]

Marvison,

Just to clarify what has been written earlier... You can use multiple PC's which all share the InfiniTV-ETH. Each PC can record from the shared tuners, and each PC can watch live TV from the shared tuners. If you don't use extenders, you will be missing the following things:

1) You won't have a shared recorded TV schedule. Each PC will have its own recorded TV schedule, so if you want to change something on the living room PC's schedule, you have to go to the living room to do it. (or... you can use the My Media Center app and some other programs which give you remote access to the other PC's on your LAN)

2) If you have copy-protected channels, the copy-protected recordings can only be viewed on the PC where they were recorded.

3) If you have any copy-freely channels/recordings, they can be moved (after the recording is finished) to a shared drive on your network, and these recordings can be viewed by all PC's on the network... but there are some odd problems with this sometimes.

The extender model eliminates all of those problems, and allows you to watch/record anything from any TV which is connected to the PC or an extender.

The extenders do have some limitations too... mostly to do with audio/video codecs of video files which were not created by recording from the TV tuners. For example, if you rip your DVD's or Blurays, you'll have to be very careful to encode them in such a way that the extenders can play them. And... if you download video files from the Internet... you never know if they'll work with your extenders until you try to play them on the extender.