so I’ve been wanting to ditch my cable box, add a SAN, and have a general server for pretty much all needs except gaming. It’s going in my basement right below my TV (in the room above) and I’ll run an HDMI cable up to it it.
I just scored 2x 3TB external drives for $200 total at staples thanks to them matching best buy and taking one of their coupons on top (I’ll be using them as internal drives)
Mstream cable cards can decode many streams at once can’t remember the limit. Silicon Dust has the HDHomerun Prime network based tuner box that can have 6 tuners.
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Additionally I should add that Ceton and Silicon Dust are the only ones out there that produce cable card ready tuners. All other tuners you see are ATSC (Over the Air) and Clear QAM only tuners. One other note on Time Warner you need a Mstream card plus a SDV tuning adapter (Windows 7 officially supports this), on VZ just the Mstream card is required.
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long term update, all is great, I would never go back to cable box.
word of warning: you must put an amp on the line because with 4 tuners in this thing it will drop the signal strength so reading the line level coming into your house is not good enough.
just curious if anyone has tried running XBMC and all the streaming video add ons…
i want to ditch cable…run HD Antenna and XBMC for all my movie and tv needs…it does have many add ons available for lots of networks and hulu plus and torrents
edit…further reading of his blog my have answer my ??? but feel free to school me anyway
I forgot to add that I got an original xbox 360 for $20 and put that on my other TV in my bedroom… I use that to also watch live TV (from my HTPC) and also anything that I’ve DVRd. It’s awesome because I can start watching downstairs and pause then go upstairs and pick up where I left off. The interface is exactly the same, it even took the custom theme I have and shows it on the xbox.
so running a cheap HTPC then extending using xbox360s is the best way to roll IMHO.
Hmm, so you have a quad tuner, that takes one coax in and doesn’t self amplify the signal ? Is there like a 4 way splitter built into it? So your losing 7db on all QAMs? The pole should be spitting out 20 at the tap, lets say 13 at your house, one 7 leg split were at 7, run to the box lose a few db at most, still should be at or near 0, built in 4way would lose 7 a leg, -7, qam should be working fine until -13ish depending on the noise floor.
I would only concur from the point of using straight windows media center. Since XBMC4Xbox is not quite up to snuff with the XBMC project anymore.
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Just a note XBMC Eden (11.0) cannot function as a DVR, the next version will have the unified interface where it can also function as a DVR.
Secondly most of the plugins work well enough, the Hulu addon works well enough as well. Though I prefer just using then Hulu Desktop App with media center integration. For netflix if you are running windows, the Media Center netflix addon is superior to the XBMCFlicks plugin in every way.
With all that said, the best method for TV and Movie consumption is using newsgroups.
