Dmitri's HTPC Project

After having messed around with GB-PVR for a little while, I decided it was time to try another front end. My friend Rick emailed me that he and one of his friends use Meedio Essentials, and that they were on sale 'til the end of the month, coming down from their normal price $60 to just $20. Now I've read some reviews of the product, and they've all said roughly the same thing, "Great and highly customizable, but maybe too customizable." I downloaded the 2-week trial and so far it seems pretty decent. It includes a beta version of their Meedio TV product and that's the only drawback in this whole sorted affair. It seems like a decent product, but the TV functionality, which was originally supposed to be released in August of 2004, is still just in beta. It took a bit of work to get it working right, and even then it has bugs. Like sometimes when I change the channel, the picture will freeze and the audio will keep going. If I switch it to another channel and come back that seems to clear up the problem within a few tries. I'm wondering if this will burn me when I set it up to record something. I guess that's what the 2 weeks are supposed to show me. One of Rick's friends, Craig, uses SageTV as the PVR software, in conjunction with Meedio Essentials. One of the biggest features of Meedio, which I've neglected to mention is that they are around 200 plug-ins for the application which do a huge variety of different thing from importing your netflix list, loading up local movie showtimes and info, to tools to make importing your music collection easier. I believe this is by FAR the biggest selling point to the application. I'll begin to look at some of these plug-ins shortly. I wish that the Meedio company would just get their stuff together and finish MeedioTV as I imagine it would make this decision very easy for me.

To our left we have my original PC case, on it's side, openned, viens and organs exposed to the world. We can make it better. And here's how're we're going to do it: we're going to add a TV capture card. The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE, pictured below. It's a nice little card, and cheap. I don't recommend it if you're just looking for a simple TV card for your computer, but only because it doesn't come with any software, just drivers. If you have Windows MCE then you're all set. Otherwise you need to get a third party solution, such as BeyondTV, SageTV or a number of other solutions. If you just want a simple solution I'd recommend going with the non MCE version. It has fewer input options, but it'll do what you need it to. I started with a free one, GB-PVR. So far it's not bad for a free product. The only problem is that it tends to grow in memory. I'll have to play with it more to see if it's a setting I don't have right. I read just the minimum to get it up and running. I'll update more as I have more of a chance to play with GB-PVR. I may download the trial version of either Beyond or Sage this weekend.