Pain of PVR
I haven't blogged much but I have had many griefs with PVR (personal video recorder). We started with Dish PVR which we've had for about 3 years. In 2004, I bought an MCE computer in time for the Olympics but because of some software bugs in Windows, I was unable to use it. I also tried to upgrade the Dish PVR disk space but was unsuccessful. Anyway, everything was status quo until now since when we moved out of our previous home, we stopped our Dish service (since we moved into a rental).
I've purchased a Panasonic DMR-EH50S for my parents and that was a disappointment since it doesn't automatically delete old recorded shows. I thought about getting TiVo but didn't since I didn't want to hook them up to a phone and deal with various cabling issues. Maybe I should have gotten a TiVo box after all.
Anyway, with that experience I decided to resurrect my MCE 2004 and after patching it all I found that the processor was too slow. I tried to upgrade with Sempron 3100+ but it won't boot and I returned it. I next bought a Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz (64-bit capable) and it came up without any problem (but still kind of slow). I bought Beyond TV (for 2 tuners) but it turns out that one of turner will not work (some driver problem) and Beyond TV cannot use the turner which does work. So using MCE 2004 (with only 1 tuner) is what I make do. I'm not happy that the video and audio are not in sync but I guess I can live with that.
[I went with MCE because I wanted dual tuner and RAID hard drive but I didn't realize how much noise 3 or 4 drives would make! I don't have to worry about HD failures but what a pain it'll be if Windows crashes on me have to reinstall everything.]
I've also had many grief with wifi networked on our rental home but that's another blog complaint....
I've purchased a Panasonic DMR-EH50S for my parents and that was a disappointment since it doesn't automatically delete old recorded shows. I thought about getting TiVo but didn't since I didn't want to hook them up to a phone and deal with various cabling issues. Maybe I should have gotten a TiVo box after all.
Anyway, with that experience I decided to resurrect my MCE 2004 and after patching it all I found that the processor was too slow. I tried to upgrade with Sempron 3100+ but it won't boot and I returned it. I next bought a Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz (64-bit capable) and it came up without any problem (but still kind of slow). I bought Beyond TV (for 2 tuners) but it turns out that one of turner will not work (some driver problem) and Beyond TV cannot use the turner which does work. So using MCE 2004 (with only 1 tuner) is what I make do. I'm not happy that the video and audio are not in sync but I guess I can live with that.
[I went with MCE because I wanted dual tuner and RAID hard drive but I didn't realize how much noise 3 or 4 drives would make! I don't have to worry about HD failures but what a pain it'll be if Windows crashes on me have to reinstall everything.]
I've also had many grief with wifi networked on our rental home but that's another blog complaint....
posted by DannyHSDad at
8:34 PM
