On topic because if it's HTPC I'll be doing it myself :-)
We have a four year-old Philips DVD/HDD recorder that has worked 100% reliably until now, but alas it's now developed an intermittent fault and can't be relied on, so it has to go.
Basic requirements - doesn't have to be hi-def as we aren't bothered about that and we don't watch a lot of movies, but it would need twin Freeview tuners so that we can pause live TV, record one channel while watching another, record two channels while watching playback of earlier recording etc., etc. One thing our Philips machine has that's invaluable is what they call a "Time-shift Buffer" - it's like a 6 hour long conveyor belt IYSWIM :-)
I'd literally never heard the term "Home Theatre PC" until just yesterday and I quite like the idea of building my own but, although I've built about 50 computer systems for family and friends over the years, I've never built one for the sole purpose of watching/recording TV before and I know nothing about that so a few questions come to mind.
First question - we have an Amstrad DRX890 Sky+HD box (but we don't have the HD subscription) which has one HDMI socket that connects to the TV (a 3 year-old Panny 42" plasma) and one SCART socket which connects to the DVD/HDD recorder. When I've got something on the Sky box that I want to keep, I send it by SCART to the HDD of the DVD/HDD box and then record it onto DVD. Can an HTPC have a SCART input to accept recordings from my Sky box? If not, how do I do it?
Second question - All recorded programmes are important. People only record what they want to see so there's no room for error - I don't want to have the first five episodes of a six-ep series and then miss the all-important climax of the final episode, so are home-built, HTPCs 100% reliable? I don't want to have to constantly reboot, tweak, fiddle, lose important programmes - I just want it to work with a minimum of fuss like our Philips DVD/HDD recorder has done for the last four years.
Finally, can anyone point me to a website or other group for more information. Google throws up a few but they are dated from 2007 and
2008 so not much use now.Thanks