The Lessons of Greed

By Jerry Pournelle

April 19, 2004

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Home Entertainment and the PC

My original notion for a theme this month was a Home Entertainment PC. We have a TiVo system, but there have been problems. Meanwhile, Microsoft and others have been telling us about how wonderful a PC-based Home Entertainment System can be, and I thought I'd build one so I could tell you about it, but I ran into difficulties.

One major problem is that my Adelphia cable system is digital—a digital decoder is needed to watch programs—but PC video cards such as the ATI All-In-Wonder devices have analog-only tuners. I can use the ATI to watch TV from an antenna, but the only channel it can see from the cable is the one the decoder is supplying. The PC sees only what the digital decoder box is tuned to, and can't change channels under programmatic control.

There are ways to change the digital channel. For example there is a clocked TV Remote Tuner device that sends the appropriate channel change signals at selected times. TiVo uses something like this. Of course it's a kludge, and a fairly awkward one at that. Note that in the old analog days this wasn't a problem, and you could easily record one channel while watching another. With digital systems that's a good bit harder to do under PC control.

There are enough questions that I am going to wait until I know more. PC-based Home Entertainment Systems will be discussed in depth at the upcoming WinHEC conference in May, and I won't build my Home Entertainment PC until I've learned all I can from that. By then I will probably have accumulated all the stuff I need, including wireless ways to get video from the PC to various televisions in different parts of the house. I can do that if I play a DVD on a computer. Until then, maybe the TiVo fans have something.

Movielink Woes

Movielink is a company backed by no fewer than five Hollywood studios.

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