tv I want to watch whenever I'm ready to sit down & watch it

[rosebee]

I REALLY like our little homemade tivo! Like really really love it! There's (almost) always stuff on it that I want to see. And it's just sitting there, waiting for me whenever I'm ready to watch it. And we have something like 200 hours of recording space, too. :D

I'm fond of a reality show on TLC called "Little People Big World". It's about a family of 6. Twin boys, a younger sister and a younger brother. The parents are both little people (dwarfs) as is one of the twins (they're fraternal twins, obviously). It's amusing and interesting. Especially for the local factor. The family lives on a farm out in the suburbs of a large town a couple of hours from where I live.

I finally caught "Jericho". I've only seen the one episode so far (#4 I think it was), and I have a BUNCH of questions so far even after reading all the episode guides of the previous episodes. But I think that's the way the show's supposed to go.
I've got Heroes episodes #1 through 3. HTB sat down and watched them all last night. I haven't seen them yet so I haven't asked him how he liked them. I plan to watch these today (maybe tomorrow after work).

I have a short week at work this week & next!!! I'm SO excited! HTB & I are taking a 4 day weekend next weekend and going over to Boise for the wedding of one of his good friends. It should be nice. I'm really looking forward to it.

At 1 o'clock this afternoon HTB & I get to go have a wedding cake consultation at the bakery department of one of the upscale grocery stores around here (they do really good work, and I'm looking forward to the meeting). We've picked out 4 different cake & filling combinations we want to try and we'll get to look at a book of designs and it should be all sorts of fun.

Comments

[rainbow.livejournal.com]

daddy would like to know about how you made your own homemade tivo! xoxoxo from boo

[rosebee.livejournal.com]

Here is where I posted about all the things we first bought.
http://rosebee.livejournal.com/319881.html

We put all those things together and then also bought a graphics/video card (so we'd have an S-Video out to hook up to the tv).
The graphics card we used in the HTPC was an nVidia 6200SE that came with the computer I bought from HP in January. We bought me a new nVidia 7200GS and that cost $68 from newegg.com.

Another $200 was paid for a dual-tuner TV capture card and tivo-like software called BeyondTV. The dual-tuner card means we can tape two different things at the same time. The capture card we bought was Hauppauge PVR-500. We bought them both in a package deal from Snapstream Media, Inc (I think their site is snapstream.com).

Then we paid $42 for a cable signal amplifier & new cable from Radio Shack so we didn't get such a bad reception on our new HTPC.

We could've saved a lot of money if we'd gotten a cheaper case, but I didn't want something that looked like a computer in my living room.
And the 400GB hard drive sounded really large, but even on a 'good' quality setting (which is just fine, BTW) we have only about 220 hours of recording room. And since we bought a DVD burner for stuff we really want to save long-term we can just burn to DVD.

I'm REALLY liking it. The best part is that all the stuff I like to watch is automatically recorded (once I told it what to always record new shows of), and it's there ready for me to watch it whenever I'm ready to watch it (I don't have to remember to sit down in front of the tv at a certain time to watch something).

Let me know if your daddy has any more questions about how we made our HTPC (it stands for Home Theater PC).

{{hugs}}