Photo courtesy of Cetoncorp.com
If you’re like most Americans, I’ll bet you watch TV on occasion. Probably more than occasionally. In my household, we watch TV everyday. We have hours upon hours of shows that we record on the DVR and we don’t want to be tethered to just one TV in the house. If you’re like me, you have a multi-room HD DVR hooked up so that you can record shows on one cable box and watch them throughout your house. You can watch the game in one room and your wife can watch last night’s installment of Honey Boo Boo in the other room. Multi-room DVR is awesome, right?
You know what’s not awesome? Paying $20 per month for that HD DVR and then $10 per month for each of the other HD boxes throughout the house. That’s $30 every month just to use the cable company’s set top boxes. There has to be a better way to do things, right?
Cue this nifty little device: the Ceton infinitiTV 4.
The slick looking device you see above is none other than the Ceton infiniTV 4. This PC peripheral is a cablecard tuner that can watch or record 4 channels at once. Say goodbye to the cable company’s 2 channel record/watch limit. All you need to do is rent a cable card from your cable provider, which typically costs about $4/month. Forget the $30/month you’re paying the cable company. After the cable card is installed in the tuner, you hook that up to your nearest PC and plug that PC up to your television. Now you’ve got your PC working as a cable box.
After you’ve got your first PC set up, you can connect the rest of your computers in your household as long as they’re connected to the same network as the first, preferably wired, for data speed’s sake. Another option if you don’t have another PC hanging around is to use an Xbox 360 as a media extender. You can watch live TV on it or stream music, recorded tv, or movies from your main PC.
Yes, there is an initial payment for the tuner that you don’t have with a cable company, but if you can get past that, you’re home-free without having to pay the cable company to rent their equipment, ever again!
That’s just the hardware side of things, as we still have yet to discuss software. You’ll have to stay tuned to read more about how you can use Windows Media Center to harness the power of this amazing quadruple tuner.
The Ceton infinitiTV 4 PCIe is priced at $199.00 and also comes in a external USB model that can be used if you don’t have the room inside your computer to install another PCIe device. The USB model is also good for those who want to use a laptop as your set top box, just be sure that your laptop has an HDMI or DVI output.