Anyone used Tivo similar features on computer? (1 Viewer)

[rbirk]

I was interested in buying a Tivo or similar originally. Then I found out there are similar features on the computer like Nvidia's Personal Cinema, ATI's All-In-Wonder, Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR and other PVR, DVR (and all the other names they use).

Does anyone have any experience with these? I was planning on using my secondary PC for this (a 500 MHz celeron) so good MPEG hardware is probably needed?).

The feature I am more interested in is the ability to watch and record at the same time (i.e. start the recording and later on watch the begining and catch up by skipping commercials etc).

Ron Birk

 

[Duncan Barth]

I am using an ati all-in-wonder radeon (the old one) in my htpc, under win2k.

To be honest, its sort of finicky. It uses a *lot* of processing power to record at any decent level of quality on a PIII/800. If you have a celeron 500, you will want to look at a solution that has onboard hardware mpeg encoding.

The software isn't really the best either. Its unstable. (Though this should be tempered with my view of computers in general: 'if you have to restart more than once every few months, its unstable')

Also, it has too much of a 'computer' interface to it, instead of an 'appliance' interface... in other words its powerful, but there aren't easy 3 click ways to find shows you want and record them, etc.

I don't watch much broadcast TV at all. If I did, I'd get a TiVo, no question about it. The interface is just *that* much better. But since I don't watch much TV, I'm willing to live with the quirks of the ati solution.