Building a HTPC... Need advice

[agathodaimon]

Ok, so I'm putting together a HTPC.

We have (or will have) Time Warner digital cable service, and they include HD channels with the digital service.

I was interested in putting together a HTPC to record shows, then tune into OTA signals as well.

A few concerns:

1. Do I need Windows Media Center? Or should XP Pro work ok? I don't want to purchase another copy of Windows if I don't need to. I want this to be easy to operate, for my wife's sake. (I've seen some tuners with remote controls?)

2. What's the best (easiest to use) TV Tuner card out there? I'm looking at this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16815116016

3. Would PCI or PCI-X work better? I only have PCI slots right now in my older Athlon machine, but if I need to upgrade, I will.


Any advice? What kind of setups do you use, and how do you use them?

Thanks

 

[Blain]

I've had a HTPC in use for about two years now.
From my experience and reading I've done...
* This is the combo package you want if you have only PCI slots.

Or you could buy Beyond TV and get free remote and buy the HVR-1600 TV card here.
The bad comments for this card are mainly for the included software, which wouldn't be used with Beyond TV.

I use Beyond TV with the HVR-1800 card.

 

[agathodaimon]

That beyond TV looks amazing... So, does the remote work like it would if I had a cable box?

With a program guide, etc?

I'm seriously considering that first package you linked... Does the HVR-1600 have QAM, or does it matter so much?

*edit:
I should have mentioned that this is a non-HD set we're using, but eventually will be replaced with a HD set... If that matters...

 

[Blain]

I use a Gyration Ultra GT combo.
I find that I want a bit more input control when using the HTPC than a simple remote offers.

But then again, I am quite an advaced user. For me, most pedestrian devices just don't make the cut.
If you're a simple low-end user, the remote should offer you more options than you can really handle.

 

[agathodaimon]

Looks cool, but my wife would kill me if I continued spending money on this project... hehe

 

[Blain]

Explain to her that with hard times coming, it will be money well spent.
You'll be cocooning more rather than "going out".

 

[agathodaimon]

True.... hmm.... Sitting back on the couch, using my Gyration. lol

 

[Blain]

It takes about 1-2 minutes to get used to using the Gyration air mouse. :thumbsup::laugh:

 

[ZetaEpyon]

Are you aware of the limitations of HTPC tuners and digital cable? The card you linked will only be able to tune HDTV channels that are unencrypted QAM. I don' t know what Time Warner offers that's not encrypted, but for most cable providers, it's just local channels and maybe a couple others. Something to be aware of before you drop a whole bunch of money on this.

 

[weeber]

I think Blain has a lot of your situation covered, but here's my 2 cents. BTW, I've been using an HTPC for about 4 years now

1. I use Windows XP myself and it works fine. As opposed to beyond TV, I use SageTV. The link will give you general info. Both offer trials so you can try before you buy. I also record via firewire from my Comcast cable box. It works great for me, I get all my channels, except History-HD and On-Demand.

2. For tuner cards, I like anything Hauppauge. The one you linked to is popular and good, but you may also want to take a look at the Haupauge 2250. FWIW, the recording software that comes with these cards is generally considered not be very good in terms of ease of use. It takes something like SageTV, BeyondTV, or MythTV to really make recording easy.

3. As far as I know, for this application, there's no advantage of PCI Express over regular PCI, just depends on what you have available in your computer.

For your remote situation, I've heard good things about the gyration. Personally though I use a cheap URC All-4-One remote because I was able to program it to work with my TV, receiver, and SageTV front end. Having one remote to control everything in the rack is nice. I'd look at some of the remotes offered by Harmony. BTW, I'm not currently using a special IR receiver for the computer. The Hauppauge receiver works with my universal remote.

As an aside, do you want to be able to record from the TW cable box? If so, does it have a firewire output? Even if it does, it's not guaranteed to work, some companies disable the firewire ports on their boxes. If you get a tuner card that can tune the clear QAM channels (like the Hauppauge 1800), you're guaranteed to get the HD channels of your local broadcasts. But HD variants of cable channels (ESPN-HD, Disc-HD, etc.) will probably not be available because they're typically encrypted and not broadcast in the clear. Some areas are worse than others about what they encrypt though. Do you have an HD TV with a QAM tuner in it? If so, the same channel that your TV picks up when you plug the coax cable into the back of the TV will be the same as these clear QAM tuner cards pick up.

If you want your other HD channels, then another option to consider is to get the Hauppauge-HD which accepts a component signal from your cable box, encodes it to an MPEG4 stream and saves it via USB to your computer. I know that this device is integrated into SageTV to work out of the box. Not sure about Beyond. Note that it changes channels on your cable box by use of an IR blaster...at the appropriate time it uses an IR transmitter to change the channel on the cable box like your remote does.

This is probably more than you wanted to know. Having an HTPC is a lot of fun and offers great flexibility, just be warned - expect to spend some time getting everything to play nice and once you get everything working, expect to spend more time continually improving it.

 

[agathodaimon]

We will more than likely only have 1 cable box, and it won't be on this TV. We'll just use the TV remote for channel surfing until we get the HTPC up and running.

The TV we "will" be getting will have all the tuners built in... QAM, ATSC, NTSC, etc...

Oh, and Time Warner gives you HD variants of the channels (that have HD) for free with their digital service... It's nice. SO I don't know if I even "require" a QAM tuner in a tuner card.

 

[weeber]

Originally posted by: agathodaimon
[snip]
Oh, and Time Warner gives you HD variants of the channels (that have HD) for free with their digital service... It's nice. SO I don't know if I even "require" a QAM tuner in a tuner card.

I think you misunderstand. You need a QAM tuner to pick up the signal. Essentially, QAM is the type of modulation that cable companies use to send digital signals over their lines. Your cable box has a QAM tuner in it to tune the signals coming through the coax line. AFAIK all digital channels are sent in the QAM modulation over cable; however, only some of these signals are in the clear (i.e. not encrypted). Hence you need a clear QAM tuner to decode these signals. A lot of digital channels are not sent in the clear and are encrypted. A clear QAM tuner will be unable to decode these; however your cable box has special hardware that allows for the decryption of these signals so they can be sent to the TV.

In the same vein, if you want to get digital over the air signals you need an ATSC tuner, since all digital broadcasts over the air use the ATSC modulation.

That's why I linked to the Hauppauge-HD device above, because it takes the video signal from your cable box after its done the decryption. With digital cable television, the days of simply plugging the coax line into the back of the TV and receiving all the channels is over. Digital channels are being encrypted. For instance, in the Atlanta area, Comcast encrypts all the digital channels expect some home shopping networks and the local broadcast stations, which have to remain decrypted by law. In my cable package, I get all the expanded HD and all the digital channels. However, I have to use my cable box in order to view most of these channels. There's no way for me to watch these channels by plugging the coax cable into the back of the TV or any PCI tuner even though I have the alphabet soup of tuners (QAM, ATSC, etc.) In all likelihood, if you want to have your all the channels available to you via cable box you're either going to need to record via firewire (my solution) or get the Hauppauge-HD.

*Edit*
I just thought of a better way to explain this. Even though you're paying for these digital channels, most of them are still encrypted. When you pay for your digital service, you're really paying for your cable box to have permission to decrypt and send the signal to your TV. For this function, your cable box and the cable co. office have to communicate back and forth with each other. There's no add-in computer tuner in existence that has this capability. There are some manufacturers that build cable-card equipped computers that do this, but you can't build them yourself, they're expensive, and I haven't heard great reviews on them.

 

[agathodaimon]

Ok man, take a breather... lol.

Thanks for the information, that clears all this up.
This is my first HD set, first HD cable, first HD ANYTHING!

But I don't know much about how it works, so that really does help bring it in to the light for me.

Side note, by WHY are these channels being encrypted? If TV never was before, why is it now?

 

[weeber]

Originally posted by: agathodaimon
Ok man, take a breather... lol.

Thanks for the information, that clears all this up.
This is my first HD set, first HD cable, first HD ANYTHING!

But I don't know much about how it works, so that really does help bring it in to the light for me.

Side note, by WHY are these channels being encrypted? If TV never was before, why is it now?

Sorry for the long posts, I was in the same situation until recently. I used good 'ole analog cable until a year ago when I made the big jump with a new HDTV, digital-HD box etc, and I had to learn about all this stuff. Now I can't help myself but try to help when I see someone in the same position and all that knowledge I learned comes rushing out.

WARNING - the below is just my theory. I may be way off base..but here it goes:

As to why they're doing this, I think it's just because they can. I think cable companies got jealous when they saw people going to satellite despite that fact that every TV had to have a satellite box. They saw that people were locked into these boxes that they had to buy or rent directly from the satellite companies; whereas with analog cable people where just splitting and the coax cable to plug directly into TVs and and VCRs. That's a revenue stream they were missing. There's nothing they could do with the analog signals, if the cable companies tried to make people buy a box to watch analog cable that they'd been receiving free for years, the people would be showing up with torches and pitchforks.

However, the move from analog to digital gave them an excuse to change the game. From satellite, they saw people were willing to buy boxes. In addition a digital signal is much easier to encrypt and control. Now they were in control of what could receive the medium and if people wanted to record the digital channels they would have to buy/rent a DVR from the cable co. There is a TIVO option out there that uses cable card, but most people would rather rent a box from their cable co for $15/mo rather than get a 3rd party device.

There's no reason why the couldn't do with the digital signal what they had been doing with analog, but the cable companies now have much tighter control over the distribution of their signal and that's the way they like it.

 

[themisfit610]

Buy a Vudu

 

[zerogear]

Originally posted by: agathodaimon
True.... hmm.... Sitting back on the couch, using my Gyration. lol

That sounds dirty.

I find that one of the better ones that can do ClearQAM and OTA signals is the AverMedia PCI-E Combo (M780). And if you have Windows Media Center (Vista). You can use the beta drivers to add the ClearQAM channels directly into VMC without having to use an external program.