Updated the “TV”
I updated the TV this weekend. I should first clarify a bit. Our TV is a computer. I use a PC with a dual TV tuner in it and Snapstream’s BeyondTV to manage them. This basically gives us a PVR/DVR. It’s really nice and takes TV watching to a new level. With the dual tuners we can record 2 TV shows simultaneously (or watch one while recording another, etc). Recording shows is as easy as looking them up in the title, keyword, and genre searchable programming guide and telling it to record. You can even select option like only recording all new episodes of a TV series. Anyway, we’ve had problems with the box for a couple of years now where it doesn’t like to boot. If it goes down (crash, reboot, shutdown, power loss, etc) it doesn’t like to come back up. I’ve suspected that it was the hard drive. I can’t guarantee that’s it, but I’ve had enough anecdotal evidence to truly convince me. Well, it finally bugged Shinta enough that we went and bought a new hard drive for the thing on Saturday and I went about the long, arduous process of backing up all our saved TV shows over the network, reinstalling Windows XP (from a pre SP1 disc, I was an early XP adopter), the hours and hours of running Windows Update, installing Snapstream’s software suite (I also have BeyondMedia and the Firefly Remote), and then transferring the backups back. It took about 24 hours to complete the process. Things are looking good. Reboots are clean and easy. The box works great with just a remote for control. Now all I need is a big LCD HDTV with DVI or HDMI inputs to hook it up to.
