JC - Technology and Stuff

I want to be able to watch movies on any TV or PC in the apartment and also be able to record them so that I can watch them anywhere too. I’m sure there’s an easy way to do this but so far nothing has jumped out at me. Maybe I’m not the average household and maybe I don’t have average requirements, but there’s got to be a fairly straightforward way to do all this without having either a degree in electronics or having to mortgage my soul for the equipment.

I drew up John’s World a couple of weeks ago but my drawing didn’t include my TVs; one downstairs in the main living room, and one upstairs in the bedroom. The main TV is HD and has a Comcast HD DVR attached to it, but the one upstairs just has a normal digital cable settop box attached. My wife is always asking why she can’t watch recorded programs on the upstairs TV and has even suggested getting another DVR so that she can record programs on the other TV. That’s not a route I want to take though as it would mean being tethered to whichever TV you happened to record your show on. There has to be a way to network the whole thing.

Of course there is you all shout at me. It’s such and such a solution. Well, if you have the name of it, tell me. I’ll research it.

In the meantime I’m thinking that I have to install another cable access point in the apartment (I only have the two at present), connect a settop box to it and then attach it to a TV tuner card (so I get an unencrypted cable signal) installed in one of my PCs. Then I would have to run some recording program, not forget to set the settop box to the correct channel and record the program. After that I would have to make sure the recording was on a network drive so that any other PC could access and play it. I don’t know how that gets the picture back on to my TV upstairs though? Any suggestions?

It all sounds so complicated. Isn’t there any kind of recording system that can ‘beam’ its programs to my TVs? In fact what I really want to be able to do too is to burn my DVR programs to my network drive (or a DVD). Can I do that too? I don’t know. Maybe I’m pushing the limits of my electronic knowledge into a world that is not yet quite ready for it all. No doubt if I had the latest technology TVs and PCs then they would have all the right connectors and I wouldn’t be writing this post. But, and like I said I am just an average Joe here (well John actually), my TV is probably 5 years old. My PCs are a little newer. I live in an apartment where I can’t go tearing all the walls up and I just want to be able to record what I want when I want to and watch it from wherever I want to. Please give me some suggestions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Home, PC Tool, Technology, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.