Turn my laptop into a PVR - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

Bench Warmer · 10-18-2007, 09:02 PM

I'm in the market for a new laptop. I've been doing some research and I'd like to be able to get a laptop that has the functionality or possibly some external unit (like WinTV-PVR-usb) to be able to plug my laptop into my satellite receiver and use the laptop as a PVR. Has anybody done this? Is it even possible? I'm not that technically savvy so any advice is good. What do I need on my laptop, what's a good PVR product and such. Would Slingbox work for this? I'm in the early research stage so any advice would be most helpful...

Gobsgraham · 10-18-2007, 09:14 PM

I have a WinTV PVR USB2 MCE that I have never used. I plugged it in to my desktop to see if I could get my internal card to capture cable and the USB to capture satellite but I couldn't figure it out. Let me know if you would like to buy it. I paid about $175 for it but you can buy them on Ebay for about $125 after shipping so I would sell it to you for that. Let me know.

As for the advice, Windows Media Center or Vista Premium is the easiest way. Then everything is basically plug and play. If you want to become a little more tech savvy then you could use MediaPortal.

GreenTeaFrapp · 10-18-2007, 09:45 PM

I have a Conaxsat Duo FTA satellite receiver and it can record shows to an external hard drive. I can then hook up the hard drive to my laptop and download the shows I've recorded.

The only problem is that it doesn't do HD.

Bench Warmer · 10-19-2007, 03:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gobsgraham

I have a WinTV PVR USB2 MCE that I have never used. I plugged it in to my desktop to see if I could get my internal card to capture cable and the USB to capture satellite but I couldn't figure it out. Let me know if you would like to buy it. I paid about $175 for it but you can buy them on Ebay for about $125 after shipping so I would sell it to you for that. Let me know.

As for the advice, Windows Media Center or Vista Premium is the easiest way. Then everything is basically plug and play. If you want to become a little more tech savvy then you could use MediaPortal.

I will let you know - I'm in the very early stages of looking so it may be a while before I actually do.