Sometimes I really hate the Television Networks. They seem to insist of fighting head to head instead of spreading out all over the week. Every fall season, its inevitable that of the roughly fifteen hours of TV I want to watch it all airs in the real space of about 4 or 5 hours, meaning that quite often two, three, or even four shows are on at once. Seeing as how I pretty much hate having commercials interrupt my TV shows, I tape everything and watch it later to allow fast forwarding, which also allows me to make plans any night of the week because I’m always taping anyway. One of my VCRs decided to start dying on me… crinkling tapes causing me to miss shows when they didn’t record, and its tuner started making things fuzzy… so I went looking to buy a new VCR. No one really makes VCRs much anymore, and what I really wanted was a dual tuner device so I could finally pick up that fourth show some nights (I only had three VCRs)… they don’t make those. Even these new devices with a VCR and a DVR in them only have one tuner (you can’t record on both the VCR and the DVR from two different channels at once). After a long search, I finally just gave up and started looking for a complete alternative.
I thought about going with a Windows XP Media Center Edition based PC since I know a couple of people that have them and love them, but the price seemed to be a bit much, and it only legitimately supports two tuners. Of course, you can hack it to handle as many as you want, but reports are pretty consistant that Microsoft programmed their usual bloat and once you get the 4th or 5th simultaneous recording going it pegs the processor (which shouldn’t happen, since any decent TV tuner card actually has its on encoding processor on it and doesn’t use the CPU at all) and starts chugging, causing any number of problems, unless you spend a huge amount of money on a monster machine that can handle all that. Pricey. Then I stumbled on Medusa.
Well, really its SnapSteam Media’s software, but they titled this particular setup of 6 tuner joy after the fabled gorgon killed by Perseus. I followed their recommendations, built a $500 PC (could have been cheaper, but I wanted a special case that looked like a media component and not a PC) with the exception of a 320GB drive instead of a 40 (a nice 130 hours of storage on the “Better” quality setting), and SATA-150 instead of ATA-100; and bought the Medusa pack with the 3 dual tuner cards instead of 6 single tuners. And yesterday I successfully recorded 6 programs at once. Now, with the SnapStream Beyond TV software set up to record all new episodes of all my favorite shows, I’ll never need to set a timer again.
So, like the title says… Goodbye VCRs, goodbye video tapes, goodbye setting timers on multiple units and watching TV schedules like a hawk for unexpected changes, and goodbye pain in my ass… Hello 21st Century, and hello Medusa!