Live tv on my PC across the LAN

[flyswatta]

I gave up on the wireless - I had too many intermittent drops. One thing I can tell you is that 802.11b isn't quite enough bandwidth for smooth playback - 802.11g is.

I finally broke down and bought 100' of cat5 for $20 (US) and ran the cable around the outside of my house. I've been 100% happy since.

[daviescr1]

I gave up on the wireless - I had too many intermittent drops. One thing I can tell you is that 802.11b isn't quite enough bandwidth for smooth playback - 802.11g is.

I finally broke down and bought 100' of cat5 for $20 (US) and ran the cable around the outside of my house. I've been 100% happy since.

Hi, Thank you for your reply. Was almost certain that 802.11b did not have enough bandwidth for smooth playback. Internet Radio works alright but live TV and recordings don't playback smoothly at all. Can't afford to buy a 54g Wireless Ethernet Bridge so guess that a Powerplug adapter or hooking PC up in living room are cheapest options. Powerplugs thinking about this aren't cheap .

[daviescr1]

I think you should make your GBPVR machine work on it's own, meaning you should be able to watch Live TV, view your video files (including "legitimately" downloaded files ) and whatever picture and audio files you want accessible from GBPVR. This means your PVR150 needs to have some sort of source of signal for it to receive Live TV.

You also need a source of EPG info for your TV Guide, a lot of guys here use Zap2It, but GBPVR is versatile enough to get it from an XML file, this is the method I use since Zap2It is not available for me. I gather the info from several cable guides websites and run it through TVxb, an excellent XML grabber, point GBPVR to the resultant file and presto, instant TV Guide.

For your MVP, this is important, DO NOT INSTALL/TURN OFF THE MediaMVP software, the software is not necessary to run GBPVR and will just conflict with it. Make sure you have a DHCP server, as the MVP requires this. Set GBPVR to autostart 1 server for 1 MVP, 2 servers for 2 MVPs, and so on. Although, I set mine to autostart total MVPs + 1, it makes it faster for the MVP to start again when it sometimes disconnects.

The MVP only accepts mpeg files, so to work around this you have to transcode on the fly, it is noteworthy that it requires a strong machine to transcode, otherwise you will just be frustrated. And I haven't tried of two streams being transcoded at the same time. So you might want to reconsider transcoding any favorite shows permanently to mpeg files.

I haven't tried the Ubustream plugin yet but it's something you might want to look at for webtvs.

Lastly, you were considering building a new media server to be near your TV, since the TV signal can't reach your PC, anyway, I suggest consider about the fan noise that it will generate so consider other methods of cooling like the water cooled, etc, this is one of the reasons why a lot of us have considered the MVP. Also, consider a more powerful machine with more mem if you wish to continue with the transcoding. I would also consider the hard drive size, get the most that you can afford, it gets full quickly, 300GB can only go so far. Use your extra MVP on another TV after you create your GBPVR machine.

Well, hope this will help you out. You won't regret choosing GBPVR.

Hi, Just realised that you've mentioned in your sig that you've got a Media MVP or MVPs working using two WRT54G's. Interesting . Does this mean that a WRT54G can be configured as a Wireless Ethernet Bridge?.

Thank you .