On Jan 12, 2005, at 12:57 PM, Marta Edie wrote: > I am not familiar with the Tivo, but hear it costs $10.00 a month for > 100 hours of copying, the other DVR using Dish is supposed to only > cost $ 5.00. Is there no way just to pay for how much you would copy? > I am in the lookout for one of those, too, because i want to add this > German Channel and only Dish TV has it. - I am dreaming of that new > little mac- mini, a flat screen with dish input for my German TV and a > DVR attached as well. Does that sound ok? or am I way out here? or do > I have brainrot?
I don't know about the brainrot. The Mac Mini is of limited use within a video system because there's no way to poke a tuner inside it. You can use an external USB or Firewire tuner, but then you're getting back to the problem of many boxes with spaghetti all over the place. My idea was that I could use it for a front end machine. The MythTV machine I built does all the Tivo-like stuff (and more), and contains both a back end and a front end. The back end software is responsible for grabbing the video off the cable and encoding it to the hard drive. The front end software shows the canned video on the TV screen. The back end software can also send video over the network to any other front end running on a different machine. The Mac Mini would make a nice little machine to put in the family room with the front end software. It could grab the video off the back end machine, which could be anywhere in the house. It wouldn't make a very good back end machine because of the inelegant tuner solutions. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
