Yep, both computers are heavily suppressed and I have the Bios' in each set to do a reboot, even when in soft off.

The desktop here is designed to stay off if the power fails, that's to give the now  rather elderly UPS a chance to wheeze it's battery back to a reasonable state of charge.  A PVR (obviously) would be set to come back on, when power was restored. 

Was looking through the VHS collection today, had my annual viewing of Scrooge the 1951 film with Alastair Sim, on VHS in all it's monochromatic glory.  I really need to get a widescreen DVD copy, maybe after Christmas when everything is even more on sale.   Saw the colourized version once, thought it a waste of tape, the movie really needs to be seen in B&W.

Just thought I'd mention I picked up an HDHomerun unit and fired it up last night. This thing works very well with my computer and its 1920x1080 monitor. Installation was painless. It has two tuners built in and a GigE interface so you can watch and record, or record two different programmes from any computers on your network.

You know what someone needs to invent? A DLNA-compliant HD tuner. A box that plugs into the network and streams live or recorded full-bitrate HDTV to any media player (such as, say, a PS3). You'd select a channel just like a video/music file.

I think you just described the HDHomerun, no? I don't believe there is any additional compression the unit imposes on the television signals.

I thought a cool idea would be to locate an HDHR box in a nice high location with a pair of TV antennas and use digital microwave to backhaul it to my home. You could even mount the device at the antenna and eliminate any coaxial cable losses.

It is acctually possible donny. you can buy the equipment over the internet , no need for a special licence since the equipment and frecuencies are already licensed. Basically a small yagui , vertically installed , at the 2 Ghz band. I even saw on the net a 4 channel system but most equipment will only link 1 channel (it comes with composite audio/video inputs but i am sure an HD input ready system most exist) but has like 3 more available frecuencies or channels to be used in case of interference but only has 1 audio/video source input (like a cordless phone it only allows for 1 voice channel but it has up to 10 more frecuencies or channel to switch to in case of interference) .

I thought of that solution for a few cuban friends in etobicoke but as you can see everyone had to watch the same channel that the "master" was watching, which is Univision , 110% of the time , lol. It was supposed to be a star configuration since the "master" lives in the center of the area. People potentially moving in the near future made me choose independent 80 cm Dishes or small UHF antennas (even indoor) for OTA instead as possible (some buildings do not allow SAT Dishes). Somethink unthinkable back in Havana!!!, lol , although it is my understanding that down there neighborgs have run coaxial cables from 1 house to the next and the master has a Satellite Dish with only 1 receiver forcing everyone down the link to watch the same channel , which coincidentally by the way , 110% of the time is also Univision , lol. Somethink unthinkable here in Canada BTW, lol.

I took a close look at the HDHomerun... it only seems to work with other computers. Ie. it doesn't behave as a generic DLNA server, and doesn't seem to have any onboard storage.

Great concept though for a multi-PC household.

I got a viewsat 9000 which has PVR and OTA antenna built in. Just add an USB hard drive and try to figure out how to operate it. Other HD FTA receivers have the same feature.

Yeah, and generally the DVR portion is pretty buggy/low featured.

When I was saying microwave I was thinking something in the unlicensed bands like 5.2, 5.4 or 5.8GHz. Hey its TV, it doesn't qualify as a 99.999% availability requirement. :)

I haven't measured the actual data rate the HDHomerun is producing while I watch TV yet but I will. The aforementioned unlicensed uwave radios are available up to 100Mbs now so I'm guessing one could mount two, perhaps three but pushing it, HDHomerun units remotely and stream them back providing 4 channels of first come first served viewing.

Curiously enough, the HDHomerun has an IR receiver on the front of it but I haven't seen any information on how to take advantage of it. From a receiver sensitivity standpoint its not as hot as my LG and Sony big screens, but its not far off either. There are no on-board provisions for storage nor is there a VGA or better HDMI output either. Just 1Gbs Ethernet. However I have one of these network drives on my system with copious amounts of storage. I think I paid 100$ for it plus the cost of the disc. It will take a second disc to increase storage further but I haven't (yet) found the need. There's also no provision for NTSC decoding but in my case only channels 3 and 19 are the holdouts and time will resolve this shortcoming.

I bought this particular unit 169$ because I know from friends running HDTV cards in their computers that the satisfaction levels weren't where they needed to be. I also liked the idea of being able to take advantage of the recording/viewing/storing programmes on any of my computers.

There is a bug with specific to Windows Media Centre where it doesn't recognize many of the Canadian channels (the HDHomerun included software doesn't suffer from this). I'm guessing this has been fixed on Windows 7, but on Vista there is an effective workaround available that I'll probably try on the weekend. The feedback for it was all positive so my confidence level is high.

As someone mentioned before, the DTVPal DVR (Echostar) is only available for Sears in the US now. I bought one for my parents and they love it - so it is quite easy to use. However, the same product is now also available from ChannelMaster so Cdn retailers will have it soon - see the home page on http://www.saveandreplay.com/ for details.

I myself have built a HTPC and run SageTV - much more effort but much more control. It took a long time to make it "production quality" so the rest of the family could use it without issue - but now I wouldnt go back.

I'm currently evaluating SageTV and it looks really good. It does however struggle on a [email protected], which is a bit disappointing. Its not a freebie though. That said, I made a MythTV computer running under Linux and that's working fine - even with an older P4. Its not exactly "family" friendly insofar as it requires the "geek" hat to programme. I recorded a programme last night and played it back with much joy. Still ironing out a bug with the soundcard though. It likes the sound built into my computer but not the SB2 plugged in the slot. A bit annoying as I lose my surround sound capability on playback. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually (see geek hat above).

That is strange that SageTV is struggling with your processor - it leads me to believe it is not using the hardware acceleration on your video card. This requires the correct setup of codecs and SageTV - during playback, my CPU hovers under 10% as all the heavy lifting is being performed by the video card.

However, MythTV is free but I found the challenge is getting the channel guide perfect.