What am I supposed to buy?

[boynamedtracy]

I'm canceling cable and looking for a DVR solution.

I have an iMac. I want to DVR and stream to multiple TVs (3 total TVs)

From what I gather, I need:

• SageTV Media Center for Macintosh Version 6.6 ($79.95)
• SageTV HD Theater 300 ($149.95) - Do I need 3 of these to view on the 3 TVs?
• Some sort of TV Tuner? Which do I need for the Mac (USB of course)? The Specs on the page list two Hauppage devices that aren't sold any more.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[jnmfox]

Originally Posted by boynamedtracy

I'm canceling cable and looking for a DVR solution.

I have an iMac. I want to DVR and stream to multiple TVs (3 total TVs)

From what I gather, I need:

• SageTV Media Center for Macintosh Version 6.6 ($79.95)
• SageTV HD Theater 300 ($149.95) - Do I need 3 of these to view on the 3 TVs?
• Some sort of TV Tuner? Which do I need for the Mac (USB of course)? The Specs on the page list two Hauppage devices that aren't sold any more.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Yes you would need 3 HD300 for each TV unless you wanted to move them from TV to TV.

For an OTA tuner I would recommend the HDHR:
http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun/atsc/

I have never used a Mac with Sage but the requirements show the HDHR as one of supported tuners. The nice thing about the HDHR is you can put it anywhere and just connect it to your network. That way you won't have any extra cables mussing up your iMac .

[pjpjpjpj]

And as long as you use exclusively the HD300s to watch HD content, you really don't need much of a server computer. I'm sure your Mac will be plenty. There are some plugins that you might want to add later (commercial skipping, PlayOn, etc.) which require more server power, but as long as you are only using the HD300s, all you need is a tuner (I second the HDHR recommendation), and some hard drive space.

By the way, if you might have all three HD300s running at the same time, and you buy more than one tuner (the HDHR mentioned contains two), you probably ought to have a Gigabit network. You'd probably be fine any time you didn't have everything going at once (recording HD on two tuners and watching HD on 3 extenders), but you'd fill up a 100 Mbps switch if you had it all going simultaneously.

[davephan]

Welcome to the SageTV forum.

Are you planning on just recording over the air TV? It wasn't clear if you are just going with over the air, Netflix, or maybe satellite. If it's over the air, the HDHomeruns mentioned are probably the best choice for the iMAC. How many drives can you add to that computer? You'll want a separate drive for the OS and programs, plus several drives for the videos. Are you planning on ripping DVDs or have any other content?

If you plan to run Comskip or compress video, you'll probably want a fast multi-core processor, like a quad-core. I don't know if Macs have quad cores, since I've never been interested in owning a Mac.

Dave

[flavius]

Originally Posted by boynamedtracy

I'm canceling cable and looking for a DVR solution.

I have an iMac. I want to DVR and stream to multiple TVs (3 total TVs)

From what I gather, I need:[LIST][*]SageTV Media Center for Macintosh Version 6.6 ($79.95)

Note that Sage has stopped releasing Mac versions of their software some time ago. While Sage has not officially confirmed ending Mac support there's no serious doubt about it.