I admit I made a mistake a bit ago, and thought I'd just run JRiver MC on my Mac Mini, buy an InfiniTV 6, and avoid a lot of the time consuming stuff I'm currently going through with my Comcast DVR and my Hauppauge 1212.... Shame on me for not reading the fine print and figuring out MC doesn't do video on the Mac. Soooo..........
I have the InfiniTV 6 on the network, and would really rather avoid having to run WMC anywhere if I can avoid it. I have a Win7 PC that's on much of hte time, and can use WMC to set up the InfiniTV (shortened to ITV from here on out - I'm already tired of typing it!), but that computer is the one my son uses when he's here, and I really don't feel like trusting the fact WMC will be resilient enough to survive the lockups his game playing sometimes causes. I have a pretty happy ecosystem right now of a couple ATV3s in the house, a Synology NAS with a lot of content, iTunes running pretty reliably on the Mac Mini, and the living room video playing through the AVR. Music is streamed from iTunes to AirPlay on the Denon AVR. Life is fairly good, but I seem to go through DVR units frequently (they still have some bugs that scrozzle the brain and force a replacement), and every time I lose what's been recorded. On top of it, I get tired of the real-time requirement of unplugging the HDMI from the box and playing back through the Hauppauge for anything I want to make more resilient to DVR failures. Hence, the ITV6 showed up in the mix.
I'm seriously thinking about picking up an inexpensive headless PC (instead of being able to use the Mini I already have <sob> <sob>) to sit on the network, use auto logon to always be functioning, and was thinking of putting JRiver on that box to do the recording for me. The PCs I've been looking at all want to come with Win 8.1 now, I don't feel like popping for WMC on the box, and would like to keep this as simple a setup as I can. Will my strategy work? Will I end up with happily running JRiver MC recording for me, and end up with files I can locate on the box to either view later or convert with something like Video ReDo to hang onto more permanently? Does this plan work before I leap a second time and find something in my scheme that doesn't work?
(I'm not trying to pirate movies or anything like that. There are just things I use for teaching, and things I seem to like to watch over and over - and that seems to outlive a DVR in this day and age.)
Thanks in advance.
