Newbie Question: Setup Recommendation

[fleegan]

Greetings, all!

I am planning on shrugging off the $14/mo dvr fee Comcast hits me with monthly. My question is exactly what I need to complete it. Here is what I have:

2 PC's running Windows XP Pro ASUS MB with 2 PCIE half-height slots. Both computers have 4GB RAM & nVidia 6800GT(256mb RAM) video cards. I only throw out that I have 2 of these pc's just in case it makes it easier to accomplish what I need to. If the solution only requires one pc, great!

1 Terabyte(WD Caviar) Drive on the way.

1 Hauppauge HVR-2250 half-height card on the way.

2 Standard tv's with coax/rca/super video inputs
1 HDTV with virtually any input known to man.

I currently have a Comcast Standard DVR(Non-HD) hooked up to the main(non-HD) tv. The other tv's I have the coax plugged directly into.

What I want my setup to be:

I want to be able to record up to 2 separate programs simultaneously while being able to watch live cable on the 3 tv's I have.

If this isn't currently possible, feel free to laugh at me, but I am interested in what can get me as close to this solution as possible.

Thanks in advance for any & all answers.

-Fleegan

[stanger89]

My "ideal" solution in your setup would be:

The HVR-2250 it's capable of recording both your analog cable, and any "clear" digital cable, so probably your local HD stations and maybe a couple others if you're lucky. You'll want to search the forum for how that's setup, I'm not sure if you can overload a tuner like that in Sage, analog and digital tuning on the same card.

Run SageTV Media Center on your main PC with the 2250.

Stick and STX-HD100 media extender at each TV.

With that you'll be able to record two things at once (any combination of liveTV channels and recordings that adds up to 2), and watch anything you want on any TV independently, and you'd get HD on your HDTV (for locals probably).

Only downside of that is it's not the cheapest way to go, could use SageTV Client on PCs instead of an extender at one or two of the TVs, it would save you about $170 or so (per TV), but can be a bit more finicky to setup.

Also you could use the SD extender (MediaMVP) instead of HD100s on the SDTVs, but I'd use that as a last resort as the HD100 is just so much better than the MVP since it natively supports about everything while the MVP requires server transcoding for anything but SD MPEG-2.

[fleegan]

Thanks for the help, Stanger. I've got 2 of the extenders on the way! I did receive an email from Hauppauge that the 2250 card will not be shipped out until the 25th due to high demand, so I'll be lucky to be able to test it by the end of next week.

I'll post my findings after I've had time to play/tweak it a bit.