The story so far: built HTPC, HTPC dies, build new HTPC.

So now I have a machine recording TV feeds. This machine does not live near a TV. How do we watch the shows?

Beyond TV, in addition to the server software, has a client piece (purchased separately). This client can link to the server and play recorded shows and/or live TV. But it can not record or display TV on its own. In our media room, the PC linked to the projector runs the client. Works very well.

Our other main TV viewing area has an old tube-TV. So no easy linking a small PC running the client to this one. Instead we use a Western Digital WD TV Live Plus to stream the shows from the server.

If (when) we upgrade this TV to a flat panel, I will install a PC and use that to generate the live TV. This will give us a lot of the Tivo functionality back (pause, rewind) by virtue of using the Beyond TV client.

Note: to improve performance of the client software, I record shows to one hard drive on the server, but each morning move them to another drive for storage. I stream from this second drive. This makes things much easier on the client/server by sharing the load between the drives.

There is another machine about to join the network. This one is for storage. I have survived for a long time by having copies of various files on different machines. But recently we had a spate of hardware problems which meant that we lost some important files which did not exist anywhere else on the network. This new machine will run the unRAID software. More on this next time!