> From: Rob Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I have been looking into PVRs and set top boxes recently. I agree > with Mart that if you're buying a STB, you may as well get the PVR as > well, for all the excellent reasons Mart gave. However, I don't > agree with Mart that eyeTV and a mac is the best way to go. I don't > have that much spare money! How much did your setup cost, Mart? > $2000?
Aha - the can of worms opens... :-) True Rob, it depends on your budget and patience for other disadvantages - if you look at the Mac/EyeTV combo replacing a wide-screen LCD/plasma TV, audio CD player, DVD Player, VCR, CD-burner, DVD-burner, radio, photo library, music library, movie library, shared home computer, etc then the expense can be easier to justify. And hey - this is a Mac list, so the Apple-based solution *must* be the best mustn't it? ;-) Actually, don't tell anyone, but we did consider a Windows Media Centre setup, but at the time, pretty much all those we looked at only had analog TV tuners(!) - not digital TV, and they were pretty expensive and butt ugly for the lounge room. The flat wide-screen iMac G5 on the coffee table in our lounge is just sooo much more elegant and we watch TV on it's screen most of the time (even though it is only 17"). We do also have a data projector which we fire up for movies though - so yes, a little more than $2,000 in our case... :-) > I am only looking at a standard definition PVR. However, I think it > is important to have one with two tuners, so you can record one show > while watching another (helpful for married couples with men who like > sport and women who don't!). I'd agree this is the main disadvantage of the EyeTV as I noted previously. However, in our case, we pretty much never watch live TV. We record the news on channel 10 and SBS every day and various other regular shows so there is always some recorded show to watch instead of live TV which means we also never have to watch ads. This means the EyeTV can be recording something else in the background while we watch a recorded show in the foreground. In our case, the number of times there has actually been things we have wanted to watch on 2 channels simultaneously has been rare enough to be only an occasional annoyance. (in which case there is always Bitorrent. Wait - did I just say that? No, I must have been imagining things) YMMV (Your mileage may vary). >The Topfield unit is available in many > stores in Perth, but costs ~$1,000. This unit has 2 tuners, a 120Gb > disk and a USB2 port to import and export movie and sound files. > This is about the only SD PVR I have found in stock in Perth. Yes we looked at the Topfield as well for the two tuners but decided the advantages of the EyeTV solution far outweighed the disadvantages. > This is also out of my price range, but I discovered that there are > quite a few STBs and PVRs available on eBay. Currently, I am looking > at an Opentel box with 80Gb and 2 tuners for $469. However, price > seem to be going down all the time. We have found that to properly use a PVR to it's full extent without feeling hemmed in and spending half your time just trying to keep enough free space on disk so your favourite show doesn't get missed demands a LARGE hard disk. Our 80GB Strong STB was way too small (the earlier 40GB was impossible) and our current 250GB HD is pretty reasonable. By "using a PVR to its full extent" I mean: - Having room to schedule the recording of several daily shows (eg. several News broadcasts, Simpsons etc) - Scheduling the recording of movies on the weekends and then keeping them on disk for a while until you watch them (or get around to burning them to DVD for later viewing) I generally find most Perth stations broadcast Standard Definition (SD) digital TV at a data rate close to 3GBs per hour so you'll only fit maybe 30 hours of digital TV on an 80GB hard disk, which may still sound like a lot, but when you've got a few 2-3hr movies and a collection of Simpsons episodes or news and other daily shows and you need quite a few gigs free as a scratch disk if you want to pause live TV - 30hrs is not much at all. If you're willing to break your warranty on units such as the Topfield and don't mind getting your hands dirty, you can put bigger disks in some Set Top Box Personal Video Recorders (STB PVR) which bumps up their price of course. Another area where we found ourselves constrained with the STB PVR solution was in being limited to scheduling only about 8 or 10 recordings maximum, which again may sound like a lot, but is not enough when you have many regular shows plus irregular movies, plus schedules you want to disable but still have ready to re-enable when a season starts up again. The Topfield or other more recent STB PVRs may not have this limitation. The EyeTV can have as many schedules as you like. I also found it a pain how some STB PVRs name each scheduled recording based on the Electronic TV Program Guide (EPG) broadcast as part of the digital TV signal - sounds nice in theory, but if you set StarGate to record with 10 minutes extra at the start of the show to make sure you account for earlier start times, you find the schedule and recordings mislabelled "The Amazing Race". Grr. Also, the EPGs from Perth stations were horribly unreliable, sometimes totally disappearing, or only having poor or inaccurate info. If you do have the option of typing in your own descriptions etc, using an unwieldy remote control on a STB to do it is a pain in the proverbial. Our second STB PVR was even worse - it didn't show the names of TV shows from the EPG or allow you to type in your own descriptions - so all of our schedules and the recordings themselves were just listed by date, duration and channel, meaning you would have to look at a separate TV guide to remember which one was 10 News, which was Compass, etc. It drove us crazy. The other issue is that digital TV on a normal interlaced TV screen from a STB PVR is sooo much lower quality than viewing it on a nice wide-screen LCD on a computer that you don't see nearly as much of the quality advantages of digital TV - yes it is still better than analog TV reception, but viewing on a non-interlaced computer screen is that much better again. Even plugging the composite or SVHS signal from our STB PVR into our nice data projector gives much lower quality than plugging the Mac in using VGA. -Mart -------------------------------------- Martin Hill mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com Mb: 0417-967-969 hm: (08)9314-5242
