I have had a TV tuner card for many years. I have used it as a streaming TV server that I created using the tuner card and Microsoft Media Encoder. The TV signal comes into the computer with the tuner and Media Encoder streams the encoded signal out to any PC on my network. It works great, but I don’t use it that much. I don’t watch that much TV period. Then I do it is something on the History Channel. Using the system as a homemade Tivo was doable, but required a fair amount of manual interaction any time I wanted to record something. First I had find out when the show would be on. I do not get TV guide, so that wasn’t always easy. I had to manually put in the date and start time followed by the duration of the recording.
Vista’s Media Center changes all that. I popped the TV card into a Vista machine. The OS asked for my cable provider. Based on my zip code it figured out all the channels I get. Periodically it goes across the Internet and gets an updated schedule. At any time it has about ten days worth of scheduling data. I can scroll through and select something to watch. If the show isn’t on at the moment, it asks if I want to schedule it to be recorded. If the show is a series, it asks if I want to record the whole series. Really cool.
All this is built into Vista’s Media Center and costs nothing extra to use if you have a TV tuner card.
All the recorded content can be viewed from other computers as well. You do have to watch the hard drive space. One hour of video takes up about 4 GB of disk space. You can archive recorded TV on a DVD or CD, but that takes time and planning.
I still don’t watch that much TV, but it is nice to have the convenience of making a digital copy whenever something as big as High School Musical 2 hits the Disney Channel… at least the kids think so.