What I don't understand is why do people do it, I don't see what advantage it has over a dvd player (which most people have anyway). Do people encode their dvd's to HD or something?
Few people would just watch DVDs on an HTPC - in fact, I hardly ever do. What do I do with it? Well, I have my entire music collection there, and that's my main use of it - so 300+ albums available for selection via scrolling through album covers for play/queue. I also use my HTPC as a digitial video recorder (PVR) and have two DVB-T tuners for Freeview duties and and DVB-S2 tuner for satellite (including BBC HD). Finally I watch downloaded DivX/XVid files on it - something that DVD players can do, but not half as well due to the fact that with a PC you can use different decoders. Those are just my uses, others additionally use them for gaming, web-browsing, etc. etc.
Hi John,i'm currently looking into purchasing a satellite tuner for my HTPC,which one are using and would you recommend it for use with vista 32bit and windows MCE? Thanks for any info.
Thanks.
What I don't understand is why do people do it, I don't see what advantage it has over a dvd player (which most people have anyway). Do people encode their dvd's to HD or something?
To be honest, when I think about HTPC I just imagine people downloading their films to watch on a big TV rather than buying the dvd.
I too live in France & use dual FloppyDTV satellite TV tuners in Vista Media Center. What makes you think that it's useless?The satellite tv is very interesting but because I live in France it's totally useless ...
The only one really worth considering is the Floppy/FireDTV devices from http://www.digital-everywhere.com Cards from other manufacturers can work particularly with Free To Air channels but nothing beats the FloppyDTV for ease of use in Media Center, troublefree installation, reliability & best of all decent support from the manufacturer.Hi John,i'm currently looking into purchasing a satellite tuner for my HTPC,which one are using and would you recommend it for use with vista 32bit and windows MCE? Thanks for any info.
The only one really worth considering is the Floppy/FireDTV devices from http://www.digital-everywhere.com Cards from other manufacturers can work particularly with Free To Air channels but nothing beats the FloppyDTV for ease of use in Media Center, troublefree installation, reliability & best of all decent support from the manufacturer.
The only one worth considering? Surely that's a bit strong for FTA? A single FloppyDTV card comes to ~£140 delivered - for anyone not considering introducing a CAM into the mix that's pretty poor value for money, even more so for anyone thinking about a dual tuner set-up. If the BlackGold card does what it says on the tin, and the OP isn't desperate, there's a clear advantage in waiting a month or so - two weeks for the card to be out, then a month for it to be out in the field and show how good/reliable it is. In common with the FloppyDTV card, it does also seem to attempt to package MCE integration out of the box.
I think nigel was on about for Satellite (DVB-S and DVB-S2).
The Black Gold dual tuner card may be wonderful but because of their track record in fixing customer problems with their DVB-T (Freeview) cards I will reserve judgement.