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Simply, it's standard PC, including an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, an Abit AN-7 motherboard, a cheap video card with S-Video Out, hard drives, DVD drive and three Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 TV encoding cards and one PVR-150.
Originally, I used an Antec Overture case designed for home theater PC use. However, the early version of that case did not have enough air flow nor power for my use. I changed my HTPC case case to a standard Antec tower case. This one is not designed for the HTPC service.
For extra air flow (I have 4 TV tuner cards plus a heat-sinked video card), I added an Antec Cyclone slot fan, but that's a pretty noisy solution -- not motor or bearing noise, but the noise of moving the air. Also, the Antec Cyclone fan only lasted about 4 months before the bearing went out. Not satisfactory. I replaced it with a brand-X similar slot fan which has performed quietly and well. Imagine that...
The motherboard decision was made in concert with the processor decision. I'm a fan of the AMD Athlon XP processor because of its price compared to comparable Intel processors. The processor decision alone saved me a couple hundred dollars. I've used Abit motherboards for both AMD and Intel processors. Abit has a history of releasing new BIOS flashes for their motherboards, so I would be able to do some upgrading later.
The processor and motherboard are complemented by 1GB of Mushkin memory. To round out the system, I have two 250GB hard drives, a Sapphire Radeon 9600, a TDK DVD-writer, a floppy drive, three Hauppauge PVR-250 TV encoding cards, and Windows XP Professional to control it all.
Resolution is an issue when I need to read "computer" text, since the dots-per-inch on the screen are not the same for computers and televisions. This means that I am generally not able to read small text when using my TV as the output. Not a problem with the SAGE TV or DVD software, but it is a problem with computer software. My solution is use the free remote-control software RealVNC. From another computer on my home network, I log in to RealVNC on the HTPC and then am able to see and work with the HTPC's display on my other computer. Cool. This is mainly used for debugging and maintenance of the system.
If you have a home computer network, SageTV® can use the hard drives on other computers as if they are on the SageTV main computer. This gives you easy expansion for disk space. Disk space availability is one of the biggest pluses to SageTV. If I was running a TiVo, I would have a choice of drive sizes. When I ran out of space, I would have to delete stuff. With SageTv, I can delete -- or I can add another hard drive, or even add access to another hard drive. Voila! More space!
With three PVR-250 cards, each connected to Cable, I'm able to record up to three different shows at a time. At the same time, I can be watching a DVD through the HTPC, watching a pre-recorded show through the HTPC, watching one of the currently-recording shows (from the beginning, and pausing when I want to), or watch something on the TV straight off cable. I did need to get a Radio Shack one-to-four cable tv amplifier to get enough signal strength.
Frey Technologies also offers supplementary programs to go with SageTV HTPC software. Sage Recorder runs on a different computer with its own TV encoding card(s), and let's SageTV schedule the recordings as part of the main scheduling. In other words, you don't have to go to the second computer to schedule a recording. Sage Client is a client version of SageTV. You can do almost everything on the SageTV host that you could if you were there, but do it remotely. You can also stream video from the SageTV host to the Sage Client and watch it using the same convenient interface.
Although I haven't used them, Frey Technologies (the developers of SageTV) reports that, as of version 2.1, SageTV supports the new, cheaper Hauppauge PVR-150 and the PVR-150MCE, and also Hauppauge's new dual-tuner PVR-500. System requirements, including a list of supported TV encoding cards, can be found on the SageTV website on the SageTV System Requirements page.
Copyright © 2004-2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.
