[Update I fixed the URL for gbpvr.com]
My birthday present from the How To Select Guides (AKA Mike Schinkel and Mike Gunderloy) was a D-Link DSM-320RD AKA D-Link's MediaLounge with DVD capabilities (NOTE: Mike S and Mike G didn't actually purchase this for me, it was a result of my payment for the writing I did for the email components guide which is coming soon). This appeared to be a nice addition to my Hauppage PVR-150 capture card (which was my birthday present from my wife and kids).
My Goal
I don't ever want to miss 24 again, and I don't want to care whether Fox is airing it for 2 hours or for a single hour. I want to simply point some kind recording mechanism at the show and say record this always. I also don't want to mess with tapes of any kind. Sounds like TiVo which is true, but I really could care less about watching live TV (unimportant); I just want to know that when I sit down to watch TV that there are programs to watch. AND, I want to watch on my television and not my computer.
The Hauppage PVR-150
Wow! That's really all I can say. The Hauppage card has a built-in hardware MPEG encoder, so the unit records TV straight to MPEG. It comes with a remote which I have yet to need. My goal was to get a setup so that I can record television to video files without slowing my desktop to a total crawl. I had an ATI capture card which was adequate, but the software that I was using kept flaking out on my card with each new release. Speaking of the software
Software
The Hauppage comes with adequate software to basically replace the VCR, but I wanted something more sophisticated. The ATI card I had been using came with a little better software, but I wasn't thrilled with the fact that everytime it recorded, my desktop was not extremely responsive.
As a result I have been toying with Media Portal (which is open source). This is the stuff that a lot of people are talking about. I recently gave up on it because it seems that each release either breaks some functioanlity or some aspect of the configuration is harder, etc. Just my opinion, you may find things different.
I am now using gbpvr (www.gbpvr.com). This seems to be way easier to use and configure. I am totally thrilled. It even has internal hookups to Zap2it (the free tv listing service), so there's really no need to play around with xmlTV (a script that downloads the listings and puts them in XML). I'm getting ready to play with some of the plugins to see if I can get the auto-commercial remover script and to re-encode to xvid to save some space.
BTW, both Media Portal and GB-PVR were written in C#.
D-Link DSM-320RD MediaLounge
The role of the DSM-320RD is to wirelessly pick up my video, music, and pictures on my desktop and transmit them to my TV/Stereo setup. It is a UPnP client that talks to UPnP media servers running on your desktop. Once again I quickly realized that the bundled app might not be the best.
This is still a bit of an experiment for me. Like most reviews that you will read, I found that pictures and music work smoothly, but video can be a little choppy. I've started using Tversity (tversity.com) as my Media Server. It does the standard music, pictures, and video, but it also adds some links to media on the internet. I just recently read that there is a way to hack their list and add a few of your own. It will also re-encode the video on the fly to get a bitrate that the 320RD can handle. I still get video stutters, but this seems to be only when my main machine is recording. I will probably move the media server to a different box which should fix the problem... now if I could only build plugins to the media server. I'm pretty excited about this one (it's really cool).
The 320RD has one other feature that makes life a little better. Remember that DVD Player? Well you can burn video directly to disc and drop the disc in the player. Video played in this manner has no stutters at all!
