I know some of you have htpc setups. Its something I've never really looked into. I have a laptop with hdmi for playing and streaming movies. But I am wondering if those of you on eastlink are able to get any extra tv benefits? Can you get hd content for "free" - meaning with basic digital cable? Any benefits like that? I know that it can be used to record shows, but can you program it as easily as a PVR box right from eastlink? Once you have a PVR from eastlink, HD is only $5 extra a month I believe.

I'm just trying to decide if its worth it to me to set up an htpc for cable purposes given that I watch movies via my laptop.

Regular Digital boxes don't do HD, I keep on bugging the bar owner to upgrade to a silver Motorola box, but he's too cheap.

One benefit if yer a leafs fan, you will get the Sportsnet East HD feed, but not the regular Sportsnet East SD feed.

The Only reason to upgrade to HD is if you want to watch sports. 99% of the shows I'd watch anyways I can download. If it wasn't for sports and I'm splitting it with my roommate I'd not have any HD feeds at all.

Steve-O got it right. If you are not a sports nut then dont bother.

Otherwise build an HTPC and use that for HD movies etc. You can do them pretty cheap nowadays.

I have an HD PVR and an HTPC. A little over kill since both have dual tuners.. A lot of my recordings are duplicates.. I record in HD and standard def really - way more room on my HTPC so I tend to record not as often watched shows on there. Sometimes I would rather watch a show in standard def just because comskip has marked the commercials for me and I can just hit the button once to skip the commercials.

Yup they're right. Just get a mini board and pack it into a case.

Steve had a nice one in a older case before the mozart. Was really sleek.

My next project (SOMEDAY) is to gut a old NES, dremel it out and install it in one of those.

Yeah I can't wait till I can get a Mini board and a new capture card and shove it all in a small box. My mozart case is getting old, most of the case fans are dead (stupid odd sized fans).

Did you buy it off kijiji?


I only know a few who own Mozart TX cases.. Myself and Steve-O.

I sold mine a while ago on kijiji. Just wondering if you got it from me.


B

Its not the TX I have, its the Mozart VC4000 HTPC case. The TX would look very out of place in my living room.

LOL

It sure did for me as well =)

I almost forgot about this thread
I was just thinking about this again this morning.

So what kind of card should I look at for use with eastlink's standard digital cable box? What kind of software do you guys use? Any suggestions for good reading?

The PVR is costing us $15 a month, which isn't much, but if I set up an htpc and it's easy enough for my wife to use too, then we could just get rid of the PVR box. We have HD right now (it came free for 6 months) and we don't watch it that much, so we could live without it.

If I were to replace my Hauppauge 150's it would be with one of these:

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/ ... r2250.html

I have no idea if this will work on HD or not.. it might. I only looked at it to know its a dual tuner card that can come in half height and would be able to replace my 2 150's. I split the cable coming in and send 2 to my current cards and one to the HD-PVR box. Reception has been fine on all devices.

Also I'm currently using SageTV 6.0 on Windows XP. They are up to version 7 but I have to upgrade to get there and my poor 1GB of ram probably wouldn't handle Windows 7. Basically would probably need/want a new HTPC for that upgrade. I have been very happy with Sage though. Its easy to configure and gets the listings for me without any monthly fee as well. A long time ago I used the free GB-PVR but once you couldn't get the listings for free any more I bailed for Sage.

A dual tuner card would be nice indeed!

Can you get the digital cable signals? I was doing some reading and some people say that some cable companies "scramble" the digital signal and it can only be clearly received if you get a cable box from them, so only analog signals can be picked up by the tuner cards.

At this point my main goal would be to go back to the basic digital cable box and get rid of the PVR box, I won't worry about HD. I'd like to see if I can save the $15/month "rental" fee on the PVR box. But also the menu/listings would have to be easy to use and set up to record or else my wife would not be interested in using it. The eastlink provided motorola PVR is very easy to use.

SageTV is very easy to use.. as is most of the ones I've seen. Some are much harder to configure though, depending on your background (MythTV for linux - I skipped). Definitely make sure whatever you go with can get the listings without any monthly fees.

I've never tried to pick up the HD analog channels on my cards because I don't think it would work (they are pretty old tuner cards). I do know that I can get them on my Viewsonic TV in the bedroom with eastlink. I do have an HD subscription but some of the channels I can get in my bedroom aren't even ones I'm paying for.