The West Wing and PVRs

Michael Gartenberg | August 06, 2003, 11:09 AM

Next Sunday the 11th, BRAVO is running the a West Wing marathon that includes most of the best episodes of the first season. The reason this is not totally off topic is that I want to record that marathon and I am trying to figure the best way to do so. My Replay units seems a good choice, but I want to save this stuff for later viewing and neither Replay or TiVO lend themselves well to that task. I will definitely use the Media Center PC to record them, but while MCE lets me archive to DVD and play on my laptop, I also want to stream the content and use it on other devices, such as my iPaq. So I spent last night configuring a machine I had been building with Snapstream. Snapstream is a software based PVR solution that records into MPEG2 so my Gateway network DVD player can see the content, but also transcodes into Windows Media so the files work and stream well on my iPaq. I can even watch live TV streamed to the iPaq (and access that TV stream and the recorded content from any PC in the house or on the Internet.) It’s a pretty cool solution but not perfect. Since it’s encoding via software in realtime, the quality doesn’t match up to the MCE experience. It’s also not something for the casual user. This product is Enthusiast Only but once you get it working (and set the proper encoding rates for your network and devices) you get some impressive results.

Right now I have all three systems primed to record the marathon, I’ll report back on the experience provided by all three next week.