Living with a Digital Living Room - Main Media PC
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As I mentioned earlier, my main PC is set up in the living room. It's a pretty beefy system, dual core running at 3.2 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, and lots of storage space. I would highly recommend a dual core CPU if you plan on recording shows with the PC.
To get the TV signal into the computer, you have to use a TV tuner. If you are looking at TV tuners, you have to get one that supports hardware decoding, or it won't work with Windows Media Center. I actually have two TV tuners in my PC, so I can watch one show and record another.
My first TV tuner is an ADS technology MCE hardware upgrade kit. This comes along with a Media Center remote and IR receiver. If you don't want to use a mouse and keyboard, the remote is a must. The TV tuner can use RCA connections or coax.
My other card is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150. I have the set top box running into the ADS Technology card via S-Video (it has lack luster Coax quality), and straight coax cable from wall to card to the Hauppauge. This only gives me the 70 or so channels I get with the basic cable that don't require a set top box. This means that I can't record or watch two shows that are both above the 100 channel point, but this isn't ever a problem. Getting the different input methods using different TV guides is tricky, though it can be done with a little reworking of the registry.
Bedroom PC
My bedroom PC is an old laptop, as I explained earlier. It's not that old, but it doesn't have the CPU power of the main PC. It has a Pentium M 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, and an 80 GB HDD.
This is a good PC for doing one thing at a time. If I want to encode a show using a program I mention later, it makes the current TV view very choppy. It's the bedroom PC and not used all that much, so it's not that big of a deal.
My laptop didn't come with a TV tuner, and there isn't a PC slot to run it off of, so I went with a cheap USB tuner. I got a Dell Angel TV Tuner off of eBay for roughly $30. Considering how much other tuners run, it's a steal and works well. The Coax input is of worse quality than the S-Video, so I use that from the set top box.
With the minimal specifications of the computer, and the small hard drive, I try to keep what I record and programs running to a minimum. I only have that single tuner in there since it isn't used much and it probably would be a problem recording one show and watching another.
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