Actually many of us had a very functional easy to use system like that. It used SageTV and multiple SageTV Extenders. All media stored on a server, WHS or whatever. Extenders with TVs spread around the house. It 'just worked' and had high WAF.
Unfortunately Sage sold out to Google and none of the product is available now. Nor is the old product being supported. It would be wonderful if JRiver could pursue a similar path. No, I don't mean selling out to Google. Please!!!
Rod
+1
I use Beyond TV on my server and the Link client on my HTPCs. It looks dated now, but is so very easy to use. I manage 8 hybrid tuners from the clients, all live TV, recording scheduling, viewing recordings, and file deletion functions are handled by the clients.
I pull all of my ripped audio & video media from the server with MC17 (no software on the server pushing content, just the clients pulling files). This relieves the server from possible transcoding jobs while TV recordings are in progress. I suppose that if MC is to maintain the high audio standards it now adheres to, transcoding isn't an option, the client will just have to be able to handle whatever is on the server.
A server/client architecture is very convenient for me, but I'm worried about the viability of thin clients.
Possibly, using MC17's Theater view pushed from a server on a dedicated thin client would look and handle like the Theater View I'm used to. I've seen so many write-ups of micro machines playing Blurays "successfully", I have to give them some credence. However, I have to point out that I don't see any follow-up articles regarding the completed projects' performance. Are they really sharp, free of artifacts, and drop-out free? Or are they so pleased with their initial success that they are still overlooking these common problems months after getting their systems up and running?
My real problem is how responsive will the thin client be? MC has grown to the point where it seems to require a little CPU/VPU horsepower to be as responsive as a CD player is to remote control inputs. I don't know how well a low powered CPU/VPU combination would respond to the overhead of generating a high-def screen in Theater View, or generating a play list of a portion of my audio media on-the-fly.
The dual core Celerons with little Fermi 520 video cards I'm using are staying perky, would a thin client?