So I’ve been stepping into the wild world of building a better pvr. I currently have a Hava Wireless HD, and a Hauppauge 1600. The Hava works wonderfully with Vista MCE, but short of some nasty registry magic, there’s no real way to have a stb tuner card and a direct line (much less two direct lines as the 1600 has), in MCE. Even more striking is that VMC’s Qam support is limited to OCUR enabled cablelabs boxes, and the HD Homerun. So, I had to find something to give me all of that dual tuner scheduled recording goodness I craved, and since I am officially broke thanks to purchasing the hardware, free was my budget.
GB PVR. It is the cat’s meow. I really wanted to get mediaportal working, but after days and days of struggling with trying to get the settings just right and getting both hauupauge tuners working, I was just exhausted. It’s a beautiful program, but you really need a rocket surgery degree to figure it out. I decided (2 nights ago?) to put a little bit of effort into GB-PVR. Yesterday morning? I broke it a little bit, trying to force an EPG update (which ultimately occured because I didn’t get rid of the old EPG before changing the stations I was asking it to download, which ended up in stations cancelling each other out, etc…)
Last night, I got everything working very smoothly (the web interface is fairly painless and as functional as webguide).
The program just works. I watched journeyman as recorded through gbpvr, which quietly works in the tray handling scheduled recordings separately for each of the 1600′s tuners, and the quality was stupendous… everything you would want out of an hd broadcast. that program just works. It’s titanic downfall is its ugliness, but for an open source setup which has had qam support for under a week to just "get" the card, and be able to tune in channels, let you bind those channels to any epg station you want with a handy drop down menu, and give you total control over your tv viewing and recording, I give it a 9.5. All the eye candy in the world can’t compete with a program that simply works in a relatively user friendly and accessible manner.
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