My first PVR PC using MCE 2005 & Xbox 360... Please Help :)

[Schnieds]

My first PVR PC using MCE 2005 & Xbox 360... Please Help
Hey all,

My wife and I decided that we didn't want to pay monthly charges anymore for a PVR service, however now that we don't have it we really miss it. I do have an XBOX 360 and a nice home computer, so after doing some reading it looks like I can create my own PC PVR with just the purchase of a TV tuner.

I would really apprecaite some feedback as to whether or not I am on the right track with my setup as this is my first experience with MCE 2005 and a PC PVR.

Here is my proposed setup:

-XBOX 360 in living room, hooked up to my AV receiver via component video and optical audio. The receiver deliver's the TV input.
-PC in my office. I will install MCE 2005 and then stream TV & movies I record to my 360 in the living room via an excellent wireless G connection.
-I only have one cable line in my office, can I add a splitter and hook up my broadband cable modem and TV tuner to the same cable line?
-From the reviews I have read, I plan on purchasing an NVidia DualTV MCE PCI card.

Please let me know what you think of my setup, any suggestions and/or comments would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[darkswordsman17]

Ok, so you would have a coax cable in your office that you'd hook up to your PC to record?

Yeah, you can split it and have one got to the computer and one to a modem. If you bought that tuner then you'd actually split it again for the dual tuners on the card. Not a big deal, and there shouldn't be much signal loss.

Sounds like you're on the right track. You might consider getting more hard drive space, with maybe one dedicated for just saving recordings. Depending on what settings you use, you might fill it up pretty quickly.

 

[Schnieds]

Originally posted by: darkswordsman17
Ok, so you would have a coax cable in your office that you'd hook up to your PC to record?

Yeah, you can split it and have one got to the computer and one to a modem. If you bought that tuner then you'd actually split it again for the dual tuners on the card. Not a big deal, and there shouldn't be much signal loss.

Sounds like you're on the right track. You might consider getting more hard drive space, with maybe one dedicated for just saving recordings. Depending on what settings you use, you might fill it up pretty quickly.

Yes, I have a coax cable in my office that I currently have connected to my broadband cable modem. In this new scenario, I would split the coax and send one end into the broadband cable modem and the other end into the NVidia DualTV card.

I am thinking of getting a cheap 300GB drive for about $100 for just PVR functions, I assume that will give me ample room.

Do you know if you can burn DVDs from the TV shows you have recorded?

Any other suggestions?

 

[DerwenArtos12]

Couple things, number one, it's easier than it sounds, relax.

Secondly the new Nvidia is a great card. Swordsman needs to read a couple reviews though, the nvidia dual splits the signal internally, you would only need to split the cable once, and yes, spliting it like that would work just fine.

The way you'd like to arrange it will make it the easist possible but, I also have to reccomend a program called BeyondTV, I've been using since, well, a long time ago, when it was version 2 and my 9600pro was brand new. It is not really any harder to set-up, it's cheaper than buying WindowsMCE, it supports the nvidia card and it allows you to record directly to mpeg2/4 or wma Depending on the quality I can tell you definatively there is not good answer to you question of hard drive space. With the exception of a couple of shows I keep, I will delete the show after I get to watch it once or twice and I still have well over 100GB of video files however, at mpeg2(what I use) there have to be atleast 30-40hrs of video in that space.

Also, i have not tried it yet, as I don't have an xbox360 but other snapstream users have still managed to get the video streaming to their xbox360's. And using my Windows2k3 server I have my shows streamed to every other computer in the house and are available when I'm on the road over the internet.