[WinsOBoogi]

Then I must make one!

Basically, I now want what we all thought was going to happen: Mac mini with front row and DVR. My dream setup would be using the mini as the all-encompassing tool, starts in front row as it is now, but has a "TV" option as well. From there, the mac displays TV in full-screen mode, and has DVR.

I thought that there's several options: One would be to buy a mini that was unveiled today, and somehow hook it up to my analog TV. That takes care of everythind except for DVR -- I suppose I could by a TiVo or whatever. The other would be to buy something that does, in fact, take care of DVR on my mac.

What do you guys recommend? Is there really a program out there that has the user-friendliness as TiVo? Remember, I am, after all, a mac user, and user-friendliness and intuitiveness are the main draws of trying to make this set up.

[ndptal85]

ElGato for the DVR. I priced out everything I'd need, including a 20.1" LCD and it came out to around $1450. Thats with the top of the line Core Duo Mini, 1GB of RAM.

[WinsOBoogi]

I looked that up myself, and I've also found this MediaCentral program that seems to be really, really good at directly using the EyeTV TV, just like I imagined that FrontRow would be.

I just started looking into the whole TitanTV thing -- it looks eh, especially compared to the really intuitive TiVo interface.

[hotani]

I'm going full-on media center with my machine - as soon as my 37" monitor gets here (today or tomorrow).

Here are the essentials of my setup:
- MediaCentral is perfect for providing an interface to my media: movies, TV shows, photos, music. My only gripe with it is bad navigation in video files, part of that could be due to my 867 clock speed though.

- the 16:9 37" monitor mentioned above. It will display 1080p via DVI connection to the computer (1920x1080 resolution).

- ATI Remote Wonder lets me control everything from the couch. Best $30 i've spent yet.

- Sound: 5.1 card by M-Audio, software is flaky but it is about the only option out there and has been mostly trouble-free. I have some Logitech 5300 5.1 speakers on the way.



I only have an older dual G4 which plays most video with no problem, even 720p HD content as long as it is not xvid (HD .avi files require more processing power than h.264 apparently). Eventually this will be upgraded to a dual G5 or intel powermac, but for now it will do the trick.

I currently have no way of saving content from my cable connection, but the EyeTV 200 looks like a good device. I thought about an EyeTV 500, but it is insanely expensive at $350 and saves content in MPEG2 format which takes up about 8GB/hour. That's a lot even with my dedicated 300GB drive. I'd be interested in a similar product, but not until it can save things in something more reasonable like h.264. The EyeTV 200 does this with SD content and converts on-the-fly to mpeg4, so I'm sure they'll have something available eventually - although I'm a little scared of what it's going to cost.

Still, I'm searching (waiting?) for an online 'streaming' solution. I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee of some sort to have full access to TV shows and movies via quality streaming format. I don't even care about keeping them - once you play around with the movie trailers "on demand" in MediaCentral, you'll see what I mean. If all your content was available like that why have cable? Unfortunately this model doesn't seem to exist yet, and I'm not too hopeful that we'll see it in the near future.

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally Posted by hotani

I'm going full-on media center with my machine - as soon as my 37" monitor gets here (today or tomorrow).

Here are the essentials of my setup:
- MediaCentral is perfect for providing an interface to my media: movies, TV shows, photos, music. My only gripe with it is bad navigation in video files, part of that could be due to my 867 clock speed though.

- the 16:9 37" monitor mentioned above. It will display 1080p via DVI connection to the computer (1920x1080 resolution).

- ATI Remote Wonder lets me control everything from the couch. Best $30 i've spent yet.

- Sound: 5.1 card by M-Audio, software is flaky but it is about the only option out there and has been mostly trouble-free. I have some Logitech 5300 5.1 speakers on the way.

This is fun. I've gone totally towards video quality at the expense of user interface. Here's what I have:
Video: BenQ 6200 projector (1024x768 at around 11' diagonally), connected by a 60' VGA cable to my G5 in the closet of my bedroom (I installed a very tasteful hole in my wall for that cable). That's about $800 these days, plus 50 for the cable, and about 25 for painting a giant white square on my wall.
Audio: Creative 5.1 computer speakers (don'tk now the model), connected by USB with a Phillips Aurilleum surround sound device. I paid about 80 for the speakers and 30 for the USB sound card.
Capture: $5 a month cable TV upgrade to HD comes with a free firewire-enabled cable box if you ask them for it. I download cable streams direct to disk with modified AVCBrowser, slightly modified further (by me) to support command line args for automated recording (with applescript and iCal). Watch them in VLC as they download or later.
Remote: wireless keyboard (apple) and mouse (logitech). I'm not very satisfied with these things, and I think I might get a dedicated remote, but it will have to have good range.
My G5 is a dual 2.5 with 1.5 RAM, hard drives are 200 and 160.

I thought about an EyeTV 500, but it is insanely expensive at $350 and saves content in MPEG2 format which takes up about 8GB/hour. That's a lot even with my dedicated 300GB drive.

I deal with the same problem, but keep in mind that 37 hours is a long time considering you don't watch TV 24/7, and also SD shows (anything on cable, for example) only take a 3rd of that (100 hours). And if as you mentioned, you aren't planning on saving those shows forever, 300 GB will be more than enough. You can also set up an automated system to monitor for new recordings and compress them to mp4. You'll probably take a small hit on quality, and deinterlacing will be a little puzzle (just half-size it probably), but it's completely doable.

For me, I do save (most of) them. I use MPEG StreamClip to edit commercials and remux to program streams, then whatever you want (handbrake would probably be easiest, I personally have an unreleased beta product from the 3ivx boys) to compress for archiving. I only have a 200 GB drive, and even when I go away for 2 weeks it's not full when I get back (after recording Daily Shows and Simpsons's and all my ABC soaps like Alias). And it's about half full of non-capture stuff already too. Anyway, what I'm saying is it's not as tight a fit as you might think. 8 GB is not the unmanageable beast it was 3 years ago.

[deermatt]

media central would be amazing, if it actually had tv channels that you would actually want to watch.i wish somehow i could hook up my dish network dvr box to my imac

[hotani]

I found a way to get more options for internet TV (I refuse to use Real, don't know why that is a requirement for their TV viewing). Go check out Democracy Internet TV, download and start getting shows. There are tons of channels out there and in a few minutes I was able to find some interesting shows. The downloads are saved in your Movies folder in a directory called DTV which you can navigate to via MediaCentral. Unfortunately the filenames are sometimes cryptic, but so far everything plays well.

Uncle Skeleton: that is an impressive setup! Sounds like you have successfully turned your mac into a very functional PVR.