yah upgraded my cable for free...

[cd34]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Directv now refers to that purchase price as a "rental deposit" or some shit like that so that they don't have to refund your loss. Fucking fuckers.

read the fine print on the HD equipment. $200 buyin, $4.95/month per receiver + upgrade in package pricing. (note: I have not checked in a while as I haven't really seen anything on HD that has excited me enough to want to upgrade the current TV + receiver + dvd player + + +)

http://freevo.sourceforge.net/
http://www.mythtv.org/

If you aren't recording HD, the best capture card you can really get for the money is about $160. Since it has a hardware mpeg encoder/decoder, you can skimp on the cpu horsepower of the box. A P3/800 would provide enough horsepower to record shows with live pauses. Anything above that and you'd have no problem. I believe with the hardware card for HD, you are looking at $280 for the HD card and it requires a P4/Celeron 2.4.

If you have spare equipment sitting around, you could probably build a box relatively cheaply and have the added bonus that you could encode your DVD collection, transfer movies from VCR to it, etc and your storage is only limited by the amount of disk space (or, you can burn CDs/DVDs of your saved content). You can surf the web on your tv, review submissions to your sites, write code, etc. Your couch could become your permanent spot and you'd never need to get up. During a commercial, open up the web browser and order a pizza. Showcase photos you've taken or, play music through your stereo/receiver/TV.

I keep telling myself I'll build one out of the spare parts I have...