So, in my stubborn quest to come up with a HD DVR solution without paying $20/mo for guide data (which I'm against doing simply on principle), I've managed to get a great deal on a HDHomerun Prime. So I've got a few questions for the empegbbs braintrust:

1. It looks like if I want to get all the channels with a CableCard, I'm pretty much limited to Windows Media Player as DVR software? Is there any other option?

2. Anyone know of a good way to use a Roku as an extender? Or even a RaspberryPi? Pretty much the only thing I see people using as an extender is an XBox 360 - which I don't really need.

3. Can anyone recommend a cheapish silent PC to run Windows? Even used is fine.

/subscribed/
I too dislike paying $20/month for guide data, but I'm wondering why you didn't consider a used Lifetimed Tivo for ~$350 to $400. The only thing I see it missing is the extender, and technically you could do that, but not necessarily at a reasonable price, nor would the extender double as a gaming machine.

I'm likely moving to Mexico within the year, and I don't think TiVo offers guide data for Mexico. Other than that, it's probably the best option

Ah, yes, it would be a paper weight in Mexico. Safe travels.
In that case, rolling your own is the right path.

I'm intrigued with the Intel NUC. Does this look powerful enough to do PVR functions and play 1080p video with the Celeron processor?

I'd probably run it with a small mSata drive and 4gig of RAM and then use a 1 TB external drive for DVR storage.

My Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, running Linux with Intel video drivers, has a very similar chipset to the NUC, including HD4000 graphics. Except the XPS I have has a Core i7 CPU rather than the NUC's i5.

1080p playback is quite watchable, but with the odd stutter and some tearing. Good enough for a small (1080p) screen; might not look so great on a wall size screen.

The NUC might be better or worse, with or without different software.

Cheers

The one I linked is the Celeron version. Seems unlikely it would handle 1080p video very well then. I'll have to look around the net and see what others are saying about its video performance.

I had an HTPC running Windows 7 Media Center with a Core i3 and Intel HD Video 2000. It did 1080p output without an issue. Not that broadcast TV is 1080p... but it played BluRays fine as well. I never noticed any artifacts or video weakness.

EDIT: This is the CPU I was using. Nothing special, really.

That's a really good point. Broadcast TV in Canada/USA is ATSC, basically Mpeg streams at 1080i or 720p for the most part. The 1080i in particular will be stressful on a playback system, as it requires "de-interlacing", which seems to be more hardware/software intensive than mere "decoding" of 1080p video.

I imagine that so long as the platform is running WMC, it'll probably be fine, but I have no experience whatsoever with that software.

Cheers

One special thing: Intel Quick Sync Video. It's the dedicated video encoder/decoder part of the CPU, and seems to be one component cut in Celerons. Though I saw some report variants of the Celerons having just the decoder.

If the software stack takes advantage of either the encoder or decoder on the CPU, it would probably work fine, with plenty of raw CPU power available for whatever else. Pretty sure WMC does. Not sure how support is on Linux though, one hurdle for usage was removed back in January.