Home Theater PC

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Why did I do it?

After running multiple video cassette recorders for years, drooling over the TiVo® advertisements, and hearing the praise heaped on TiVo by relatives, I decided to build my own version -- a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Why, you might ask?

Well, it goes like this: The Fun of building an HTPC. The Challenge. Flexibility. Storage space. No monthly service fee. Video streaming across my network. Higher (and lower) video quality options. My hard drives. System maintenance. Easy software upgrades. Let's just say, I build my own PCs and it fit my needs.

So, I started reading. First, the biggest question was "what type of HTPC software do I need?" After that, came the issues of the HTPC case and the other HTPC hardware, such as the TV-encoding cards. The TV card comes third because, while there are few manufacturers of TV cards suitable for Home Theater PC's and personal video recorders, the selection of software may (and does) narrow the choices dramatically.

The two big alternatives were Sage Technologies' SageTV® and Snapstream's BeyondTV®. Snapstream's product was the older of the two and had gone through several generations (they recently released version 3.5). SageTV was a relative newcomer with some significant unique capabilities. Both had large followings, but I liked the SageTV forums and the support and camaraderie exhibited there. Both products had free, time-limited trial versions available.

For my Home Theater PC, I chose SageTV for my HTPC softare because SageTV would support multiple video capture cards. That was the deciding factor for me. (Beyond TV v3.5 added this ability for cards with hardware-encoders). Although I would start with only one card, I expected to expand my system. My HTPC now has three!

Some features that helped me choose SageTV

uses TV cards that have hardware components to encode the analog TV signal to digital. Cards using software encoding need not apply.
has very low CPU requirements, since the the encoding is done by the video card.
handles multiple TV tuner cards automatically -- I use three Hauppauge PVR-250 cards now. The wildest SageTV setup I've read about included two PVR-250s, one PVR-350, four of a USB variety and one ATI E-Home Wonder. (As of the recently released v3.5, BeyondTV supports more than one TV card.)
includes a free TV schedule/guide service. They use Zap2It for those, and I was already using Zap2It as my guide to the TV schedules.
can to use directories across the network for recording shows or viewing recorded shows
has the ability to stream mpeg2 video to a SageClient on another PC. (BeyondTV couldn't stream mpeg2 -- you would either record in a Windows Media format or spend your time decoding/re-encoding to make a copy you can stream!)
has the ability to watch live TV, effectively as if it was already a complete recording (start late, jump around, etc). BeyondTV was able to do this if you recorded in mpeg2, but then it wasn't stream that file to another machine -- it used Windows Media Player for streaming video.
has the ability to automatically control SageRecorder (optional related program) on another networked PC with its own TV encoding card.
has full-featured, time-limited trial versions of SageTV, SageRecorder and SageClient.
does not require or use Microsoft's .Net. It is a Java application.
usually has an open beta program for coming versions -- the beta installs over any registered copy
has a very active hobbyist group who develops improvements to the user interface -- improvements that are downloadable and installable by all users.

The most commonly used TV encoding card, in both Windows-based and Linux-based systems, is the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250, which lists for $150, including a remote control. SageTV has out-of-the-box support for Hauppauge remote controls and support for third-party IR receivers.