A home theater PC (HTPC) has been an elusive goal for me. For as long as I can remember (well, almost) I have been fascinated with the idea of getting a TV signal on to a PC. Over the years I have played with most of the available options.

Combine that with a love of re-purposing old hardware and we have a project!

In our current home we have a “media room”, where the satellite, over-the-air antenna, and a PC are hooked up to a projector. For a while I have been interested in replacing the satellite with something more affordable.

We are spoiled at the moment by having TiVo. We no longer watch TV, we watch TiVo. We have absolutely no idea what night the various shows are broadcast. But, if we can’t watch TV for a while we know that the shows are waiting. Or we can save an entire season and have a weekend devoted to that show. That raises the issue of storage space.

First, I checked on the TiVo and made a list of all the shows we record regularly and the channels they appear on. There were 15 channels, three of which we would lose by moving to a more reasonably priced source. Nothing we couldn’t live without on those three channels.

The PC in the media room does very well for what it is tasked to do, which is play DVDs, display photos, be on the Internet, and stream video content. It is not the most powerful machine in the world, so putting it in play as a media center was questionable.

There are usually two roles given to HTPC’s:

• play previously recorded content (DVDs, MP3s, etc), or
• record TV, acting as a PVR

I needed the latter. The machine I had available was an AMD Athlon 3100+, 2Gb RAM, 80Gb HD, FX5200 256Mb AGP video, KT400-ANB motherboard. The OS is  Windows Media Center 2002. I also had a Hauppauge 950Q USB ATSC tuner, and a couple of really old PCI TV tuners.

I decided to try Snapstream Beyond TV 4 , so I downloaded and installed the 21-day trial. Seemed to have improved since v3, but it’s been a  long time since I tried it!

Attached the 950Q, and lo-and-behold, a picture. A picture is one thing, recording ATSC content is quite another. Well, it worked and worked well.

Second test: a really old EZ-TV TVP3XP PCI TV tuner. Heavens above, it worked!

But will it record both at the same time? Yes!

With a 1.5Tb external drive temporarily borrowed from another machine, the 775Gb free space is good for 94 hours of HD, or 255 hours of SD.

I have a couple of decades of experience making stuff work on minimal hardware, but nothing can help this machine when it comes to encoding/transcoding. No big surprise there! It took six hours to transcode an HD recording to WMV. But, as an interim solution where I don’t have to go out and drop some cash on a new rig, this will work.

Next step will be to use a ChannelPlus CP3025 modulator to put the PC output back around the house on its own channel. I’ll control the PC using a wireless-connected phone, PDA, or laptop as a remote. Another use for that Dell Axim!