Interested User from FL, Introduction... and questions Options

[drvnbysound]

Hello all! I am a techie person who loves tinkering with anything electronic - from car audio to photography. I have been getting into (primarily reading) about Home Automation for the past year or so, and have since begun to install controllable light switches and receptacles in my home. I am getting ready to add take the plunge into a whole-home media server. I will admit that SageTV was my first choice, but for those who dont know, they were bought out by Google a number of months ago, and it doesn't appear that the capability it offered will be available via the next GoogleTV release. That being said, I am looking into various alternatives and WDTV is one of them. I know the WDTV devices are amazing extenders with a ton of capability - it seems like they can play every media format that you throw at it.

However, I have not seen anything regarding DVR functionality, and wanted to find out if I was missing anything, or if that was actually the case? I would love to have the ability to have a single media server, that schedules TV recordings, stores my DVD, Blu-Ray, and music libraries, and is able to be accessed via extenders - preferably small-form factor ones that can fit behind a wall-mounted LCD and go unnoticed - a glaring problem with WMC and Xbox extenders.

From what I have seen so far, it looks like I might have to go with 2 separate systems, but I hope that is not the case.

Thanks in advance for your responses. I look forward to learning more about WDTV and possibly buying some hardware soon.

- drvnbysound

[drvnbysound]

Thanks for the response. I realize that the players themselves do not... but I understand that everyone has to get the media into file formats to utilize the players. What are most people using for that? Or is everyone just downloading files and relying on others to perform the capture portion? Personally, I don't want to have to wait on someone else to capture and upload, and for me to spend the time behind the computer searching for and downloading the programs I want to watch - I would prefer to schedule the recordings myself (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)