Linked by David Adams on Mon 27th Oct 2008 23:11 UTC
As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Going from the description in the article, wouldn't it be possible to put a tuner card into the server and hook the satellite directly into it? Then you could use something like MythTV (or Windows Media Center for that matter), and use the existing DVI cabling to output to your TV(s).
The biggest possible problem I can think of (playing devil's advocate with myself) is that I'm not sure how well a tuner card / desktop-based PVR software works with satellite (E.g., it might not be possible to actually change the channel from the computer) - and there might be conflicts between the computer-based PVR and the set-top PVRs.
Or there's the low-tech method that myself and my last roommate went with: get an old PC in the 1-2Ghz range, stick an 802.11N card in it, use RDP/VNC to connect to the server, and use VLC to stream and receive the video. With a wireless keyboard attached to the "receiver" computer, that worked fairly well.