Sometime back around
2001 I finally got tired of all having to screw with tapes and vcr's so
I bought a Series 1 Tivo for about $200. I chose Tivo because it didn't
require a subscription to record and it's not much trouble to keep up
with only one tuner in a recorder. So along with the new Tivo and a
couple of VCR's I was all set. Yes, the Tivo worked great and I loved
it. About a year later a friend picked up an RCA 7000N recorder to use
for his Directv and I hooked it up for him but told him he should have
gotten a Directv recorder for less that would record 2 channels at
once. Not long after that he did and sold me the RCA DVR for $100. Just
couldn't pass that up since it also had a built in DVD player and other
extras the Tivo didn't have. So now I've got 2 DVR's and 2 VCR's hooked
to my one TV and I didn't miss recording anything.
The big problem was channels 4 and 5 (Fox and NBC
here) came in so poorly it was painful to watch shows on those
networks, so in 2006 I looked into ATSC (over the air digital broadcast
supporting HDTV) and found every station in my area had a digital
counterpart. I start searching for HDTV DVR's. Tivo's S3 wasn't out and
I was pretty sure it or no other commercial product was going to do
what I wanted so I checked into using a PC. That's when I found MythTV.
Sounded just like what I was looking for, so I checked into HDTV tuner
cards for PC's and finally decided to get a Dvico HDTV5 Gold card for
$150. More than I wanted to spend since I was planning on getting
4 tuner cards if everything worked out the way I wanted and $600 in
tuners didn't really hit me real good. Anyway, after upgrading my Linux
kernel to support the new card I was off and running. Installed MythTV
and got crystal clear reception on all channels. That in itself sold me
on ATSC. HD was just an added bonus.
Now my original plans were just to build a single PC
DVR, but after seeing what MythTV would do I decided on putting all the
tuner cards in my server (which runs 24/7 anyway) and then put frontend
boxes where my other TV's were. The only problem was the price of the
tuner cards. After searching I found some old version rev.02 Air2PC
cards on ebay for $49 each. Now things were looking a lot better.
Ordered 3 of them and installed them and after figuring out they
required a firmware file on the drive finally got them working. They
worked just as good as the $150 card. They were ATSC only, but that's
all I cared about anyway.
So now I take my bedroom TV, Tivo, RCA, and VCR's
all off the dresser (what a mess of wires) and replace all that crap
with one PC and monitor. And that's when I dumped the 144hr Tivo for
$100. Since my wife didn't want a PC on her TV I offered it or the RCA
to my wife for her TV which only had a vcr on it, but she wanted the
RCA so that's what she got. I also had to get her an ATSC STB. But that
didn't last long. She could not keep all the devices straight, but
didn't want a PC there. After getting tired of showing her how to use
all the stuff, I finally pulled it all out and stuck another MythTV box
in there for her and she loves the ease of use compared to all the
multiple devices. Im pretty sure that if I tried to remove the MythTV
box now she'd kill me in my sleep.
So that's about it. I did sell the $150 tuner card
for $90 and buy a couple more of the Air2PC cards, which I got for
under $20 each this time. Now have 5 tuner cards in the system.
Two boxes have HDTV capable monitors and my wife still has the old 32"
analog TV and doesn't want a new one. Of course a cyrstal clear picture
looks good even on the old TV and MythTV will format widescreen or
whatever you want.
Tivo finally realeased their S3 HDTV recorder. Sadly
it's very limited and very expensive. See the
comparison
if you're interested in it. In the end, I'm glad it wasn't out when I
switched. I might have bought one then. Wouldn't touch one now.
March 8, 2007