AV Rant #334: OTA DVRs
Tom is on the market for a OTA DVR and he and Rob discuss a few options. Tom was leaning heavily toward Boxee.TV until they sold to Samsung and Samsung killed them. Other suggestions include the TiVo Premier (have to pay for the service though), the ChanelMaster CM-7000PAL (which has been replaced with a newer, less good unit), the TVIX (need someone to translate the Korean for us), and the DIY XBMC (very tweaky). Of course, Rob is an advocate of the HTPC. We tackle user questions from Art, Jon, and Keith. If you had $2000-$5000 to spend, what would you spend it on? Rob and Tom weigh in. Yes, Tom said subwoofer but you knew that was coming. He also had other, less predictable answers. Rob has a Blu-ray suggestion and Tom promises to start making Streaming suggestions beginning next week. Thanks for listening. Now, don't forget to:
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I know I have mentioned it before but I will again because it is still the best OTA DRV solution, SageTV.
Unfortunately (for Sage users) they were purchased by Google and their software is now the backend for TV portion of GoogleFiber. The only downside is you will have purchase a client license and an extender (if you want one) used, they are being sold at a premium due to continued demand.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=52
There is still an active community of users for the last public version of the software.
If you don’t want to spend money than WMC is really your next best option for OTA DVR, from my understanding Xbox 360s work great as extenders.
ooh, our first comment since Tom opened it back up here on the website! 😀
Very good point, as always, jnmfox. Much like Boxee Cloud DVR, though, you’ll hopefully understand that I chose to only mention products that still have normal retail availability.
It’s a shame that good products like SageTV end up disappearing when they’re bought out by the larger tech companies. I’m sure a lot of the jailbroken Boxee stuff will continue on in that dedicated community, as well.
But, yeah, in terms of why I didn’t bring up Sage on the podcast, that’s pretty much it 🙂 I agree that WMC in Windows seems like the least problematic free option that is out there right now. Although we’ll have to see how long that lasts! I don’t think WMC is long for this world, given its greatly diminished role in Windows 8. I’m convinced the only reason it still exists at all is because there are a number of Microsoft employees and higher ups who still use it in their own homes! 😉