Greetings all,

Nomex suit on
As a newbie to this arena, I come seeking knowledge.

We have Telewest cable (analogue, still!) and a nice big widescreen TV,
surround sound, yadda, yadda.

Two things that my g/f and I have been mulling over:

1) succumbing to the lures of Telewest's digital cable service (hey, we've
got everything else!)

2) some form of PVR. My g/f's been driving this one as she's seen the Sky+
ads, TiVo, etc.

I'm an IT spod by "trade" and as such, we have a whole host of systems in
the house doing generic PC stuff.

I've been contemplating building a discrete PVR box for a wee while, now,
but having never tried before, need some guidance. I was thinking of a
"Shuttle" style PC with a decent sized (120GB) drive combined with a card
like the Hauppage WinTV PVR 350. Sling a 802.11g wireless card in the
back, hook it up to the broadband and away we go.

Or am I being immensely naive and there's a lot more to it than I've
considered?

Are there better ways of going about this?

Anyone have any experience of similar or alternate solutions?

Hardware and software recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

--
Wik ***** human response from wik at blueyonder dot co dot uk *****

Regrding the PVR, I would try and source a tivo, they are outstanding
machines and really change your perception of TV. Imagine always having
a choice of programs you want to watch...Imagine programing a series
once and only once, not every episode individually (plus when a new
series starts it automatically picks it up again)...Imagine a system
that learns the type of programs you likes and records them for you
automatically.

Tivo comes as standard with a 40Gb disk but is easily upgradable to
240Gb plus you can also network it on to a home network and use DSL for
updates.

The downside is that you can only get Tivo from ebay now as thomson have
stopped producing UK machines.

In a year or so Windows Media Center maybe a viable option but I would
certainly avoid the sky+ box, there seems to be a lot of issues with the
software and does not offer half the features of a Tivo.

Phil

Wik wrote:
Greetings all,

Nomex suit on
As a newbie to this arena, I come seeking knowledge.

We have Telewest cable (analogue, still!) and a nice big widescreen TV,
surround sound, yadda, yadda.

Two things that my g/f and I have been mulling over:

1) succumbing to the lures of Telewest's digital cable service (hey, we've
got everything else!)

2) some form of PVR. My g/f's been driving this one as she's seen the Sky+
ads, TiVo, etc.

I'm an IT spod by "trade" and as such, we have a whole host of systems in
the house doing generic PC stuff.

I've been contemplating building a discrete PVR box for a wee while, now,
but having never tried before, need some guidance. I was thinking of a
"Shuttle" style PC with a decent sized (120GB) drive combined with a card
like the Hauppage WinTV PVR 350. Sling a 802.11g wireless card in the
back, hook it up to the broadband and away we go.

Or am I being immensely naive and there's a lot more to it than I've
considered?

Are there better ways of going about this?

Anyone have any experience of similar or alternate solutions?

Hardware and software recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Yannick wrote:
Regrding the PVR, I would try and source a tivo, they are outstanding
machines and really change your perception of TV. Imagine always
having
a choice of programs you want to watch...Imagine programing a series
once and only once, not every episode individually (plus when a new
series starts it automatically picks it up again)...Imagine a system
that learns the type of programs you likes and records them for you
automatically.

How does this Tivo thing still work then? Didn't they go bankrupt or
something?

How does the box update it's schedules etc?

Mr Balloon wrote:
How does this Tivo thing still work then? Didn't they go bankrupt or
something?

Nope, they're doing quite nicely. It's just that currently there's no
hardware manufacturer in the UK. TiVo don't make boxes, they license the
software and technology to other manufacturers. In the UK only Thompson
produced TiVo capable boxes, and they marketed them massively badly
(although to be fair at the time they were trying to market something
brand new). These days blurb like "It's like Sky+, only better and it
works with cable, terrestrial and Freeview" would sell it pretty well...

How does the box update it's schedules etc?

TCP/IP connection, either via dialup from the internal modem (freephone
number) or via Ethernet if you have a network card fitted. Tribune Media
(the company that do the TiVo EPG data) are relatively accurate,
although some of the smaller channels are bad at updating the schedule
data that they send to them (stand up Paramount Comedy).

--
Angus G Rae Computing Services
Science & Engineering Support Team University of Edinburgh
The above opinions are mine, and Edinburgh Uni can't have them.

Mr Balloon wrote:
Yannick wrote:

Regrding the PVR, I would try and source a tivo, they are outstanding
machines and really change your perception of TV. Imagine always
having
a choice of programs you want to watch...Imagine programing a series
once and only once, not every episode individually (plus when a new
series starts it automatically picks it up again)...Imagine a system
that learns the type of programs you likes and records them for you
automatically.


How does this Tivo thing still work then? Didn't they go bankrupt or
something?

How does the box update it's schedules etc?



Tivo Still provide an EPG service to the UK. They did not go bankrupt
and still very much alive and kicking in the USA. The problem was with
marketing, Sky had the responsibility to market Tivo and with their own
product in the pipeline (sky+) they didn't go about it to aggressively
thus Tivo sales in the UK were to low for Tivo to continue
manufacturing. So they essentially pulled out of the UK market for
future products, that said the service is still there and there is a
healthy community providing software updates (unofficial) to the uk product.

It's a remarkable thing but for a piece of electronics Tivo's which 18
months ago sold for £150 and now fetching £200+ on ebay, I've never
heard of any other electronic product that went up in value over time.

In short as long as Tivo provide an EPG then Tivo will carry on in the
UK and there is no sign of them stopping the service.

Phil

Yannick wrote:

In short as long as Tivo provide an EPG then Tivo will carry on in the
UK and there is no sign of them stopping the service.

Thanks for that Angus & Yannick.

Do these Tivo boxes work with Sky? I know about Sky+ but to be honest, I
hate Sky with a passion, I'd be happy with Freeview. My girlfriend pays for
the Sky, but if I were to fork out for a Tivo, it would have to work with
the Sky I guess.

Mr Balloon wrote:
Yannick wrote:

In short as long as Tivo provide an EPG then Tivo will carry on in the
UK and there is no sign of them stopping the service.


Thanks for that Angus & Yannick.

Do these Tivo boxes work with Sky? I know about Sky+ but to be honest, I
hate Sky with a passion, I'd be happy with Freeview. My girlfriend pays for
the Sky, but if I were to fork out for a Tivo, it would have to work with
the Sky I guess.



Yes Tivo works with sky. I use it with a netgem i-Player freeview box
and it all works fine. check out
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...?s=&forumid=14

The UK Tivo Forum, many of your questions will have already been
answered there.

Phil

In message
"Mr Balloon" wrote:

Yannick wrote:

In short as long as Tivo provide an EPG then Tivo will carry on in the
UK and there is no sign of them stopping the service.

Thanks for that Angus & Yannick.

Do these Tivo boxes work with Sky? I know about Sky+ but to be honest, I
hate Sky with a passion, I'd be happy with Freeview. My girlfriend pays for
the Sky, but if I were to fork out for a Tivo, it would have to work with
the Sky I guess.

The TiVo will work with UHF analogue signals via its in-built tuner,
and with anything which can be input via a scart socket - so, yes, it
will work with a sky decoder. I, like you, hate Sky so use one of my
TiVos with Freeview (the other is still using only its in-built tuner).

The major benefit which Sky+ has is that it records the digital stream,
exactly as received. The TiVo can only cope with an analogue input, so
digital transmissions go through an additional A-D, compression, and
D-A process by the time you come to watch them.

If only the TiVo software was available in a Freeview PVR which records
the digital stream as received ...

--
Peter Bell -

Peter Bell wrote:

The major benefit which Sky+ has is that it records the digital
stream, exactly as received. The TiVo can only cope with an analogue
input, so digital transmissions go through an additional A-D,
compression, and
D-A process by the time you come to watch them.

If only the TiVo software was available in a Freeview PVR which
records the digital stream as received ...

I presume then the TiVo would work in the same way recording something to
video tape works with Sky. You need to leave the Sky box viewing the
channel you want to record? (Or at least set up autoview so it changes just
before).

Peter Bell wrote in message . ..

If only the TiVo software was available in a Freeview PVR which records
the digital stream as received ...

Things like the Humax are appaearing that'll do some of it... Not
sure of how 'tivo-like' their features will be but I expect something
to come along that does the job soon. That of course is assuming that
freeview get their EPG sorted out properly.

(The 8000T isn't much good for this yet as you can't playback a
prerecorded programme whilst its recording something else - negating
the point of having a PVR to a large extent...).

Tony