Whole house OTA media center ideas. Need some brains

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y0bailey

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Mar 31, 2003
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Alright. This setup is for my parents, who have finally seen the light and are ditching the cable companies. The reason I am prefacing it with that, is due to the fact that this needs to be setup by me, and non-mess-up-able by them.


The pops is going to install an attic antenna that shall get OTA signal. The splitters/etc for all coax outlets in the house are in the attic, so all TVs will have live TV OTA style.

The issue comes with the need for a DVR setup. I was going to build a Win7 MCE box with a dual TV tuner for recording. From this point I need some ideas/opinions.

My mom likes to bounce between a few spots for watching recording TV. Therefore, I need the recorded TV accessible from at least 1 other spot.

I was thinking one of the following options:

1) buy Xbox 360 and use it as an MCE extender (kinda pricey)
2) buy a dedicated MCE extender (kinda pricey)
3) setup a plex server on the MCE PC to share the recorded folder, and use tablet to cast with plex app and a chromecast (cheap).


What do you guys think? How would you rate that setup? Anything you can think of to change?
 
So i'll just let you know my expierence with this. I have a windows 8 media center (was win 7) with 2 xboxs extending to other rooms.

If you run win 8 your only extender choices are xbox 360s, you can get them cheap used, probably find some super cheap were the disk drive is broken, you don't need the disk drive.

For win 7 really your only choices for extenders are the ceton extender (which from the reviews it seems like it sucks) or the 360 again.

You could do plex but there are some issues you may run into first you may need a beefier cpu in the media center if it has to transcode the tv.

I have notice sometimes plex can't transcode certain recordings, no idea why but it will create a blocky mess when the original wasn't like that. It seems pretty random and only 1 out of 100 are like that.

If any of the recordings are flagged as copy once they will be encrypted with drm and plex can't do anything with those, you would need a media center extender to watch those.

I have never used plex on the chromecast so I don't know how well it works there but it works fine on my roku. Only thing that may be an issue with your parents is that windows media center names the files with dates and the show name as one big long string, that's how they will show up on the roku and your parents may have a hard time navigating that. The media center extenders have the shows listed nicely with info about each recording.

If you are doing wireless I do not recommend media center extenders, I tried it and the experience was poor.
 
Thanks for the reply.

Trans coding shouldn't be an issue because I would build them a relatively beefy rig.

One work around I read for the naming of the recorded MCE files is setting them up as "HOME VIDEOS" in Plex. Seems to fix the issue and make them more manageable. Haven't done it personal so take that with a grain of salt.

If that fails I would just grab MCEBuddy and transcode and rename on the fly (with commercials removed). Would have to set that up automatically (which may add complication).

At home I have MCE + another MCE rig that I share recorded TV to. I have wireless N and can stream without hiccup (full quality HD recordings). Not worried about that as they have a wireless N setup.

I think it can be done, and done for cheap without tons of compromises.
 
Are they also going to be using streaming video options?

Just a wild idea - buy a Roku for each TV and get an Aereo account. You'll have a cloud DVR accessible by all Rokus (you're limited to 5 devices authorized per Aereo account). No antenna, no rig to maintain and a bit more parent proof.

Another extender option for MCE 7 is the Linksys DMA-2100 or DMA-2200 (the later having a DVD player built in). They're hopefully pretty cheap on fleabay right now as they've been discontinued for well over 5 years.
 
David_Schroth said:
Are they also going to be using streaming video options?

Just a wild idea - buy a Roku for each TV and get an Aereo account. You'll have a cloud DVR accessible by all Rokus (you're limited to 5 devices authorized per Aereo account). No antenna, no rig to maintain and a bit more parent proof.

Another extender option for MCE 7 is the Linksys DMA-2100 or DMA-2200 (the later having a DVD player built in). They're hopefully pretty cheap on fleabay right now as they've been discontinued for well over 5 years.
Click to expand...
https://www.aereo.com

Looks like there is a legal battle. Not sure I want to put money on that horse
 
Didnt someone on here mention that you can use XBMC to track which files you watched and continue watching them from the same place on other machines?

With in mind, can XBMC be used to playback DVR'd content?
 
There are OTA Antenna / DVR all in one solutions.

I think Simple.TV is one.

For a tuner I would look at the new HDHomerun Dual Tuner with DLNA & H.264 built in transcoding. Should give more viewer options.
 
The Lurker said:
Didnt someone on here mention that you can use XBMC to track which files you watched and continue watching them from the same place on other machines?

With in mind, can XBMC be used to playback DVR'd content?
Click to expand...

I never messed and heard it was a PITA. Or used to be....honestly XBMC has made many improvements over the years. I'm sure a quick search on their forums would yield an answer.
 
The Lurker said:
Didnt someone on here mention that you can use XBMC to track which files you watched and continue watching them from the same place on other machines?

With in mind, can XBMC be used to playback DVR'd content?
Click to expand...

Plex will do this, and you can do it with dvr content as well (except drm'ed files, then its only wmc or an extender that can play them back).
 
y0bailey said:
Alright. This setup is for my parents, who have finally seen the light and are ditching the cable companies. The reason I am prefacing it with that, is due to the fact that this needs to be setup by me, and non-mess-up-able by them.


The pops is going to install an attic antenna that shall get OTA signal. The splitters/etc for all coax outlets in the house are in the attic, so all TVs will have live TV OTA style.

The issue comes with the need for a DVR setup. I was going to build a Win7 MCE box with a dual TV tuner for recording. From this point I need some ideas/opinions.

My mom likes to bounce between a few spots for watching recording TV. Therefore, I need the recorded TV accessible from at least 1 other spot.

I was thinking one of the following options:

1) buy Xbox 360 and use it as an MCE extender (kinda pricey)
2) buy a dedicated MCE extender (kinda pricey)
3) setup a plex server on the MCE PC to share the recorded folder, and use tablet to cast with plex app and a chromecast (cheap).


What do you guys think? How would you rate that setup? Anything you can think of to change?
Click to expand...

I have a similar setup but I'm using cablecard tuners and xbox 360s as extenders in the bedrooms. Not knowing how tech savy your parents are, I wouldn't recommend going the windows 7 route, unless you're close by and can fix the small things from time to time. Hard drive crash just to name one.

One thing I would recommend as a tuner are the Silicondust tuners. I think they are only dual tuners, but you can piggyback multiple tuners if the need for more arise. The reason I would suggest that is they also support DLNA. So that makes the amount of devices that can use it increases. The DLNA is only live TV. You would still need something like MCE or MythTV as backend to the DVR functions.

But I would personally get something like simple.tv or something thats an all-in-one device that is an OTA DVR. I think those would be better for the less tech savy user.

Also what I did for the xbox 360s was get them used off ebay for around $60-$70. For me after about to rent a STB is $7 a month so in a year it pays for itself.
 
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