All,
Sorry for the long-winded post...I'm hoping you can help me decide on a direction for very limited TV recording. I only get one OTA channel and only want to record broncos football games - a total of 10-12 games a year. The OTA is analog now and will probably be digital sometime in the future (it's a repeater - no mandated timeframe).
I'm looking for an economical and uncomplicated solution that will work now and when digital comes to town. Currently I have a home built WHS running 24x7 and 2 XP laptops that come and go. On the TV side, I'm hooking up a laptop when needed to stream media from the WHS now, but want to move to a set top box (popcorn hour or something like that). TV is SD now, but will upgrade to HD. I know the recommended solution is a media PC to record and save on the server, but I don't really want to spend the $ and have another computer running just to record TV 10x per year. I've ruled out using the laptops because they aren't always available and have small hdd's.
So...I'm thinking of putting a tuner card in the WHS box. Any you'd recommend that work well with WHS? What about pvr software? I'd like to stay light weight and free, but could go with something like SageTV if necessary. I've also seen posts about the problem of recording directly to managed drives - could the workaround used for uTorrent work (i.e. record to a physical location), or is an unmanaged drive needed? Open to other options as well.
Thanks for your suggestions!
Jeff