What You'll Need
Turning your computer into a full-featured media center isn't hard. All you need to do is purchase a PVR card for your computer. One of the most reliable PVR card manufacturers around is Hauppauge, makers of the popular WinTV series of cards. The card I use is a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150. It runs about 100 bucks and includes a hardware MPEG encoder for quality, full-screen video recording. It also includes a 45-button remote control. Using this setup, you can literally transform your computer into a PVR device.
The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 includes software to do all of the work for you, but if you want to really get a full-featured media center, you'll want to use some after market offerings. There aren't very many players in this area, and two of the biggest players are SageTV and Beyond TV. I'll be reviewing SageTV this go around and will offer a review of Beyond TV after the beginning of the year.
The setup is easy. You have a satellite or cable tuning box (if required) that plugs right into your PVR card. (The Hauppauge card offers a choice of composite video, component video, or S-video.) The PVR software (SageTV in this case) issues commands to the satellite or cable box via an IR transmitter that comes with the Hauppauge card. That's the big picture. Now let's have a look at the details so that you can see just how wonderful television can be.
SageTV's Interface
The SageTV interface (shown in figure 1) is simple and easy to navigate. The menu system can be navigated with a keyboard, mouse, or a remove control. From the main menu, you can view shows you've already recorded, watch live TV, view the program guide (including marking shows as favorites, recording shows, etc.), schedule recordings using searches and rules, view the media center (for viewing DVDs, photos, playing music, etc.), access the setup for SageTV and any customizations, and go into standby mode.
Figure 1 - The Main SageTV Interface
Watching Live TV
Watching live TV (figure 2) works just as you would expect from any PVR system. At any point, you can pause live TV and pick it back up later. You can also choose to record the show you're watching at any point. SageTV will then record the show starting from the moment you tuned into that show.
Figure 2 - Live TV
The on-screen display (OSD) shows a green bar for the segment of the television show that has been recorded. If a portion of the show does not exist on disk, that portion will appear as a red bar. In figure 2, you can see that I have begin watching a movie from the beginning that is actually half-way finished. Using this method, you can easily fast-forward through commercials. (More on commercials later in the review.)
 ...you can easily fast-forward through commercials.
If you want to find out what else is on, the program guide in SageTV (figure 3) is suitable out of the box. You can control what channels appear in the guide and informational icons notify you when a show is a first-run show, etc. As shown in the upper-right of figure 3, you can choose to display the currently playing video (whether recorded or live) while the program guide is displayed. Options are available to display the video in a window (as shown in figure 3) or in the background with the program guide displayed on top of it with a suitable level of transparency.
figure 3 - The Program Guide
Selecting a program from the guide will present you with an options dialog allowing you to watch the show or record the show. You can also view detailed program information, view additional airings for the selected program, view any historical airings of the show, set the show as one that you've watched before, set the show as a favorite show, and set the show as one that you don't like. The last three options are important and we'll look at them a little more later in the review.
The program guide is updated once a day from Zap2it.com and it's extremely accurate from my experience. There are ways to force a refresh of the data before the 24 hour period has elapsed. Perhaps the easiest is from the add-on Web server that is available for SageTV from one of the more notable folks in the SageTV community, Nielm. This add-on and many more are available from the SageTV forum.
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