SKY+ vs HTPC!!

[kanjar]

ok ive had sky+ for nearly 2 years now and its fantastic.. i wouldnt give the functions up for anything... however, i cannot seem to justify paying £33 a month for a function that i use on channels which are not sky related.. e.g. bbc - ch4, zeetv, sony etc (basically its the minimum package u have to have otherwise sky start charging u £10 for the sky+ function).. in all honesty i only want the family package which gives me the documentary channels etc, none of the movies or sports which i have and never watch...

Now heres the dilemma.. .im thinking of ditching the sky+ and getting a HTPC to manage the same stuff as sky+

Firstly id like to know whether a HTPC will do the same stuff as a sky+ box..

Secondly, how wud a HTPC manage multiple sky channels..

thirdly, is it worth the hassle!!

[The Allmighty]

Well the biggest problem is that you'll lose the ability to record one program whilst watching another (or recording one/two whilst watching one you've already recorded).

[Guest 3230]

Twin tuners in the HTPC would allow that - I'm not sure about software to drive that, though.

[nigel_williams]

I don't think a HTPC will support 2 separate Sky channels since there's no way of getting this out of Sky itself. You can get 2 x Freeview or use a capture card to get Sky and Freeview.

Even with MCE, it's a hassle to setup. I'm going through the process right now. Picture from MCE is a bit soft and a little laggy. I was using Showshifter (demo) for a while with my DEC2000 external USB Freeview. It gave better results, but the interface sucks.

There are a number of Linux based PVRs that you could try. I've stuck with Windows as I have MSDN so only tried MCE, MediaPortal and Showshifter.

[Guest 3230]

He said he wasn't interested in the Sky channels...