Quote:
|
Originally Posted by fimmel
what about sound for these? also can they kinda act like a tivo? like being able to have a buffer of live tv so you can fast forward commercials?
|
My board has SPDIF outputs (both coax and optical). With that, the computer is able to output 8.1 channels, but my sound system is only 5.1.
As for watching, you don't actually watch live tv. MythTV writes the stream to the disk and plays it back from the disk (with a ~5s delay). There's several technical reasons for this, but yes, it does give you a buffer. If you want to skip all the commercials for "live" TV, you'd have to pause it at the beginning, let it buffer for about 15 mins then start watching.
However, I don't think the software was designed to watch live TV. I haven't gone though all the documentation yet, but I think that the system was designed to play previously recorded programs. My basis for this is just the way the controls are laid out and the options you can set.
I set it to record all of my shows (including the ones that I stopped watching because they're on at odd times), and watch them when I have time. I've only been using it for a few days, but I think I'm not going to be watching any TV during the weekdays. If I wait until the weekend, I can be completely unproductive and spend my entire saturday watching commercial-free TV.
With regard to that, I noticed something interesting. It seems that the networks know people use Tivos and tivo-like devices so they change the way they show commercials. I noticed that some commercials don't get flagged by the software. The reason for this is that some commercials no longer have the characteristics that the software uses to detect them. I noticed that sometimes, CBS adds the fade-out before the last commercial rather than right before the show starts again.
If you have some money to burn, I highly recomend a PVR. If you're not interested in HDTV, you can probably use whatever computers you have lying around. Non-HD tuners are in the $80 range. However, if you do want HD, you'll need something equivalent to a lower end gaming rig and the tuner will set you back >$100. Oh, and in an interesting twist of fate, the HD tuners from pcHDTV do NOT support Windows or Mac, only Linux.