A little too expensive.

[heatvent]

Or one of the housemates could be designated to stay at home, watch the program and then fill everyone else in later. No additional equipment or technological knowlege necessary.

[SWKerr]

MythTV is free but I still was willing to pay for SageTV for the value it delivers. You can't argue with someones perception of value.

I also love the XBMC interface. I have been using it on my modified Xbox for years. If you really like it that much though, you can pretty much mimic it in SageMC using the custom Menus and Themes.

Heatvent's idea was a good one but it assumes they can take in what they are watching. If they are pot heads everything might sound like it was a Sponge Bob episode.

[heatvent]

MythTV isn't near as nice and takes a lot of linux tweaking to get working. It does have some nice support for ripping dvd's though.

I forget what the default skin is these days on XBMC but it is amazing. I haven't seen anything like it for SageMC although I am eagerly awating the release of Ortus (sometime this century).

[JuddMan]

Tried the housemate retelling thing. We got one of the guys to watch Judge Judy and Deal or no Deal for us while we went out, and i must say the time compression on this method is awesome.

"Some guy was suing his neighbour for hitting his dog with a stick and won, then some dumb person sued her dumb cousin over welfare checks which neither had any right to and Judge took it away from both of them"

"The guy on deal was offered $74,000 with 5 cases left to open and screwed it up. he got something like... uh... $6000"

but it didn't quite work for me.

The trial period got me addicted to TV and i am suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms.

Aww to hell with it. I just bought Sage and client.

This new-fangled VHS technology will have to wait.

[JetreL]

I love stories with happy endings! Let me know how the VHS research goes.

Now enjoy SageTV

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by JuddMan

Tried the housemate retelling thing. We got one of the guys to watch Judge Judy and Deal or no Deal for us while we went out, and i must say the time compression on this method is awesome.

"Some guy was suing his neighbour for hitting his dog with a stick and won, then some dumb person sued her dumb cousin over welfare checks which neither had any right to and Judge took it away from both of them"

"The guy on deal was offered $74,000 with 5 cases left to open and screwed it up. he got something like... uh... $6000"

but it didn't quite work for me.

The trial period got me addicted to TV and i am suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms.

Aww to hell with it. I just bought Sage and client.

This new-fangled VHS technology will have to wait.

I didn't know you get american TV shows down there. What other popular ones do you have?

[JuddMan]

I think most of our series (those shows that are just to tell a story, like Heroes or Merlin, or NCIS) come from America, but on the TV networks here, those shows are delayed for between 2 weeks to a year in order to protect the file sharing industry.

We also get many of your popular talk shows (david letterman, Oprah, Phil etc), but not the news shows.

Though our Deal or No Deal is a bit different from USA's. The people holding all the cases that the contestant is choosing are from the audience. Before they open their cases, they guess what they think is inside it, and they get $500 if they guess correctly.

Some shows we get from the UK (BBC).

We also have Foxtel here, and that is pretty much 100% American. In many places It's delivered by satellite, cause there's no cable network, but in some places, satellite can't even reach so the rich people use VHS via couriers. The store was still out of VHS when i checked by the way. I would guess foxtel or the like is considered a luxury that most don't justify having here.

[davephan]

You're probably not looking in the right place for a VHS recorder. You have to look for places where obsolete equipment is sold, like e-bay, Craig's list, or a pawn shop.

Here's a VHS deck on Craig's List for $30
http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/ele/1246226795.html

Here's a VHS deck I found on E-bay for $17.50
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI....m_guide:2&rd=1

You probably could find many VHS decks very cheap, and a pile of old VHS tapes.

The VHS decks are so cheap, you could probably give the housemates each a VHS deck and some tapes. If they complain that SageTV costs too much, just tell them to use their VHS deck.

Dave

[tmiranda]

Hey, maybe one of those old VHSs contain the Apollo 11 recordings that NASA claims to have erased.

[Menehune]

Those are probably in the stack of Betamax tapes next to the VHS tapes.

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by davephan

You're probably not looking in the right place for a VHS recorder. You have to look for places where obsolete equipment is sold, like e-bay, Craig's list, or a pawn shop.

Here's a VHS deck on Craig's List for $30
http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/ele/1246226795.html

Here's a VHS deck I found on E-bay for $17.50
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI....m_guide:2&rd=1

You probably could find many VHS decks very cheap, and a pile of old VHS tapes.

The VHS decks are so cheap, you could probably give the housemates each a VHS deck and some tapes. If they complain that SageTV costs too much, just tell them to use their VHS deck.

Dave

Wow, a little steep for worthless technology. They sell them at my local goodwill center for like $4.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by heatvent

Wow, a little steep for worthless technology. They sell them at my local goodwill center for like $4.

Wow, $4 is dirt cheap for the old VHS recorders. The housemates should be able to afford VHS decks at that price.

Dave

[JuddMan]

Well, we got one of those "VHS" things, this one even had a tape drive, like they use for high density backups, so obviously we're onto a winner here.

It's like a set-top box so you dont even need a computer! and to think here i was telling them to just go into my shared folders and watch the shows with VLC. I gotta get one of these for the lounge room. The one we got doesn't have HDMI, but the red, yellow and white plugs worked on the ones that looked the same on the TV.

The g-codes from the TV guide didn't work though for some reason it always scheduled our shows to record in 1909... wierd.