Never have enough televisions
We did something new and different today. Without spending months to research the question, we purchased a TV acquisition card for one of the computers, installed same and joined the world of those who have a PVR.
Now, there are some choices that must be made, and my criterion was expense. Our local computer parts dealer (I call him that because we’ve bought a lot of parts and very few complete systems there over the years) had a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 kit in stock. More money than on eBay, but the delivery time could be measured in minutes instead of weeks. No ugly customs duties to fret about, either.
A sign that the store doesn’t sell many of these is that they couldn’t find the item in the POS system, so the barcode scanner wouldn’t work, and the three people on duty this fine Saturday came to a decision that the item was probably not “normal”. I don’t care, insomuch as the price matches the one advertised on their website.
Home to shut down a session of WOW, find a screwdriver and install with TLC. Aren’t TLAs wonderful. For further elucidation, I refer you to http://www.3la.ca for some RSS. Note that http://www.tla.ca goes to a very different site…
My only issue so far is that the onscreen TV Guide requires some research to get functionality, but things are coming right along. I will evaluate the installed codecs in a few days, after some “note comparison” with a colleague that abandoned MediaCentre in favour of MediaPortal. Who am I, a neophyte, to argue with reason?
So, although we probably don’t really need one, given that there are no large screen media centres in the house, we now have a PVR. Now to figure out why.
