Using a Mac as a home media center?

[Nathans_Dad]

Ok Mac people. Help me out here!

We have Verizon Fios in our home. We current have 4 STBs for it with one central DVR. That is costing us about $45 a month and we are not happy with the capacity of the included DVR. We also really don't use the TV with the 4th STB on it so we are planning on getting rid of that STB to bring us down to three.

So, we are exploring options.

So far I have come up with the following three options:

1. Keep the STBs and buy a DVR extender drive, looks like this would be about $100 for a 1 TB enclosed drive. This would be the easiest solution but would not get rid of the $45 a month rental fee.

2. Use my existing iMac as our media server. This avoids the cost of buying another Windows based machine. Bad news is from what I have read you pretty much have to run Windows in Bootcamp to get the cable card to be recognized, I have not been able to find a TV tuner/streamer card or device that will run in OS X. I would also have to buy XBox 360s as extenders. Total cost for this solution would be $200 for the Cable card (external unit that plugs into the Mac), $250 for three used XBoxes (might get them a little cheaper) and then $120 or so for Windows 8.

3. Build a dedicated Windows based media server. Looks like the computer itself would run me about $350 to build, plus the $200 for an internal cable card streamer (this is the Ceton Corp card), plus Windows 8 at about $120. One question though, will I even need a graphics card or could I just run off the graphics processor on the motherboard? I'm not sure on this one, I'd like to use the server as the receiver on my primary TV and just plug in a remote control receiver but not sure if this would work or not. The MB I am looking at does have HDMI output. Then I would have to buy 2 more XBoxes, probably around $150.

Right now it seems like option 3 is probably the best option as I think getting my main Mac to do all this will be a PITA, plus it makes me unable to use my Mac software while the TVs are running (which is like all the time in my house, lol). It looks like it would take me about 18 months to recoup my costs of setting up the system given that I would be saving about $40 a month in rental fees.

So, what should I do here?

[stealthn]

Sorry is this for sound or video or both?

Either way any Mac works awesome for this without all the add-on's you mentioned, what are you trying to do?

[stomachmonkey]

I've been on a similar quest.

I have the Ceton PCI card, picked it up at Micro Center in Richardson, off 75 just North of 635. I wanted the USB version. Should have bought it online then picked up but I wanted to see it first so by the time I got there the two they had were gone.

My experience with it so far.

Relatively easy setup. Tried running it via Windows 7 in VMWare virtual machine, no go, drivers could not find the card. I suspect the USB version WILL work under a VM which is why I wanted it.

Have it running in a MacPro booted into W7, dual quad core box so 8 processors, 12 GB of RAM.

They recommend 1 processor per stream so for the 4 stream PCI card you are looking at at least a quad core box.

Being limited to Media Center is a big drawback as you are limites to what extenders you can use. Wish it were MythTV, XBMC or Media Portal compatible. There was some dev work being done to integrate Ceton with Media Portal that looked promising but it seems the dev has lost interest and the project is currently stalled.

The Xbox as an extender works OK but is not ideal. Main issue is you need to leave the Xbox on all the time to stay in the Media Center environment, if you reboot it's 5 steps to get back to watching TV. You'll want an Xbox remote, some features like flipping between last channel watched seem to be NA. Guide is a bit slow as is changing channels, can sometimes take 10 seconds for a channel to change.

Occasionally you'll get tuner conflicts which means at least rebooting everything and sometimes having to reconfigure the tuners from scratch. Have not had that issue in a while so maybe latest firmware update fixed it for good.

The most frequent issue is related, I believe, to a time sync issue with the Xbox. You'll switch channels and get a message saying "You can only watch this recorded content on the device that recorded it". Meaning it see's the stream as DVR'd content requiring the Xbox to be rebooted to fix. It may also be that the Xbox is trying to switch channels and grab a stream assigned to a different device, not sure but it's annoying. Happens once or twice a week, seems to come in waves.

Don't even bother trying to stream it over WIFI unless you have a really robust N network. Even wired it will occasionally have a bandwidth issue but to be fair I push a crap ton of data thru my network. Not uncommon for me to be pushing 20 GB of code builds simultaneously.

With the cable card you get none of the additional service like on demand, rentals, FIOS widgets.

My HOA has a deal with Grande, basic cable service is covered in my dues. My latest plan of attack is to get Grande hooked up to cover off all the standard network stuff, CBS, ABC, NBC etc..

Make a list of what content we actually watch on the other channels. I really believe we only watch maybe a dozen of the hundreds that I pay for. See if the content is available from Hulu Plus and pay the $7 a month for that. Netflix sucks, really should cancel that one, never anything I want on it.

Port my phones to VOIP or just use cell exclusively which we pretty much already do. Have to figure out the security monitoring though.

I think what makes me the angriest is I pay 2x's more for the same service as a "new" FIOS customer on a 2 year commit.

PM me for contact info if you want to chat about it.