Ok Lot's of questions :)

[JeremyFr79 228]

Ok I've got a few questions (ok maybe lots of questions) in regards to LiveTV.

 

First let me give you some back story on my current setup.  Currently I have 3 rooms that are running off of MB, I have a dedicated theater room with a full blown Windows 7 WMC Machine running MB Classic, in my bedroom I have another full blown Windows 7 WMC machine also running MB Classic, and in my living room I'm running an Xbox 360 as an extender.  The XBox360 run's off of a Windows 7VM dedicated just to it so I don't have to sacrifice resources from my 2 physical machines and also so I can run custom codec setups (especially for my dedicated theater)

 

All of these machines link back to a dedicated Server running Server 2008R2 which stores all my current media content, runs MB Server and also host's my extender VM.

 

At any rate our current TV setup is we have 2 Tivo Premieres, 1 is in our theater, the other is in our living room, our bedroom just has a standard non DVR leased cable box.  

 

Unfortunately with this setup I am not able to view any recorded TV in our bedroom, but of course the 2 Tivo's share content with each other between the living room and theater.

 

Ultimately what I'd like to do is have one dedicated machine recording all TV content, and then be able to view it across the other Media Center/Extenders, both recorded and live TV.

 

RIght now I see that LiveTV only works with web client so I realize at the moment a solution is not present.

 

However what I'm wanting to know is the following.

 

1.) Can I have one machine with a tuner (say a Ceton 4 or Ceton 6 for example) that is able to supply recorded & live TV to my other Windows 7 machine and also my extender.

 

2.) If I have a tuner in a given machine (say my media center machine in my theater) can I set it up to save all recorded content to my dedicated media server.

 

3.) Would I be better off going with an ethnernet based tuner for what I'm looking at doing?

 

I'm sure I have more questions, ultimately I could upgrade to a 6 tuner Tivo Roamio and 2 Tivo Mini's but I'd like to get away from the monthly fees and eliminate hardware/devices if possible, if I could get it down to 1 "box" to do everything in each room it would make me esctatic and of course make the wife very happy as well.

 

Thanks for any input guys!

[krustyreturns 191]

I'm not clear whether you asking about pvr in general or our serverwmc mb3 plugin.  Assuming its the later:

 

1.  Yes that is what serverwmc is designed to do.  Problem is it doesn't work with an extender.

2.  Sort of.  The windows media center recording service insists the volume it is recording to be a local drive.  However there are ways to trick it (search wmc forums).  What many do instead is run batch jobs to move recordings to the network share after they complete.  You can actually program serverwmc to do that for you.

3.  Serverwmc itself doesn't care whether it is a network tuner or a locally installed tuner, it shares the tuner output with any machine.  However network tuners are more flexible in terms of what you can do with them outside of this framework.  So if the expense is okay I'd go with a network tuner.

[Moe Manley 2]

I have a ceton 4 pci. One of the reasons I use serverwmc is because it serves the purpose of tuner pooling, because I have 4 computers and 2 Raspberri PIs running off it. The ceton 6 eth is only ceton tuner that will do tuner pooling. All their other devices network tuners require each tuner to be assigned to a specific machine.

With recorded TV, only copy freely shows can be played back on any device. Also serverwmc will not play TV that is not copy freely. However, extenders can play the the copy protected channels.

So with all that in mind and the fact that you are only trying to set up three rooms, my advice is get a ceton 4 pci and put it in your best win 7 WMC machine with a big hard drive, replace the other machine with another XBOX 360 extender that way you will get all the channels and all the recordings plus you can eliminate all your cable boxes and your tivos. This setup will not require serverwmc unless you want the webclient. The hard part will be convincing the wife you need another XBOX, but even if you don't get that you could always keep the other win 7 WMC machine and assign a network turner to it.

One last thought HD homerun prime is a 3 tuner ethernet device that may fit your needs well and you may be able to get for cheaper than the ceton device, but I have no experience with it although lots of people on this forum have it.

[JeremyFr79 228]

I have a ceton 4 pci. One of the reasons I use serverwmc is because it serves the purpose of tuner pooling, because I have 4 computers and 2 Raspberri PIs running off it. The ceton 6 eth is only ceton tuner that will do tuner pooling. All their other devices network tuners require each tuner to be assigned to a specific machine.

With recorded TV, only copy freely shows can be played back on any device. Also serverwmc will not play TV that is not copy freely. However, extenders can play the the copy protected channels.

So with all that in mind and the fact that you are only trying to set up three rooms, my advice is get a ceton 4 pci and put it in your best win 7 WMC machine with a big hard drive, replace the other machine with another XBOX 360 extender that way you will get all the channels and all the recordings plus you can eliminate all your cable boxes and your tivos. This setup will not require serverwmc unless you want the webclient. The hard part will be convincing the wife you need another XBOX, but even if you don't get that you could always keep the other win 7 WMC machine and assign a network turner to it.

One last thought HD homerun prime is a 3 tuner ethernet device that may fit your needs well and you may be able to get for cheaper than the ceton device, but I have no experience with it although lots of people on this forum have it.

Yeah I found a used Ceton 4 for 150 locally, haven't bought it though as I'm trying to decide what to do, I'd like to avoid an extra HDD in my main WMC machine as I have a very large server setup that has MORE than enough capacity for recorded T.V. would prefer to be able to record over the LAN to it instead.  As for the extra XBOX those are cheap enough used (especially since I'd only need a 4gb) and reducing down from a MiniITX PC and cable box down to an xbox wouldn't be a huge deal for WAF (besides we could then play xbox in bed lol)

 

My other big issue is that the TiVo's support full 1080/24P output for Netflix and to my knowledge Xbox and WMC do not this would be a rather big loss to me especially in my dedicated theater.  I'm still mulling this over weighing my options etc.  I hate tough decisions

[JeremyFr79 228]

Well I broke down and got the Ceton InifniTV4 yesterday, ended up scoring it for 65bux (can't complain about that one bit! ) got it all setup last night, I threw another Hard Drive in the media center that's hosting the Ceton.  After some heartache with getting tuners assigned (ended up 3 for the main HTPC and 1 for the HTPC in the bedroom) CableCard Activation (God I hate Comcast sometimes) and then DRM Issues with Media Center (my own fault really )it's all up and running.  I got done so late that outside of testing to make sure it works I didn't get to really play around with anything at all, that will be this evening.  From what I did play around with I'm pretty happy with it.  I'm not immediately shutting off the Tivo's until I can get the wife used to it all especially since most of her viewing is done on the TV with the XBox.  Once I get my Harmony's all setup for her that will make it much easier.  To me the few drawbacks I'd run into were worth it. The tuner lag kinda sucks but it is what it is.  So on into my adventure with PC based DVR now lol