tv tuner + external hard drive = PVR?

hi

i've had my dell e1505 for a few months now and am in love with it! i've recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR USB2 for MCE and i'm very pleased with that too.

a couple of questions though:

1.) i'm currently using this PVR along with media center to record several series with weekly showings. will the continuous cycle of recording, watching, deleting, recording, watching, deleting... effect the life of my hard drive?

2.) and if it does, and i buy a nice external hard drive is there a way to set up media center to record my shows to the new external hard drive? instead of it recording them automatically to my internal hard drive and me manually moving them to the new external hard drive (which in theory would be the same as just leaving them there in the first place because it would still be writing to the hard disk and then deleting from the hard disk, right?)

i know i could use the softward included with my tv tuner to write to an external hard drive and if i have to i will use that software, but i would rather use media center because of the more user friendly interface.

i hope this isn't confusing, and thanks for the help!

 

sorry i cant asnwer ur question, i will say im sure there is a way to change the location of asaved file
my question for u is
lets say you record a one hour tv show using ur wintv pvr usb2
could u tell me about how large a file is produced
id really appreciate it
thanks

 

1. The answer is most certainly yes. In general I don't think this is really something to be concerned about though. It's a smart idea to do what you can to limit wear of electronics to increase the uptime on them, but not to the point that you don't get the full use out of them.

If you avoid using something so it lasts longer then what's the point of having it in the first place?

 

i guess it depends on how good of picture quality you want and what program you use.

a one hour show i recorded using media center set at the best picture quality (i don't know what format) was about 3 gigs.

but a one hour show i recorded using the provided software set at mpeg2 - 12mb/s was over 5 gigs!

i'm sure the lower the setting goes the smaller the file size becomes

 

as with all video files. the smaller the file size, the worse the quality.

i would assume you could change where media center saves its videos. if not, u could just make a temp folder on the normal hard drive, then move them over to external hard drive after a day of recording.

 

Yes, I use Media Center to record all of my TV shows to my USB WD 250GB external hard drive. In Media Center...Right click-->Settings-->TV-->Recorder-->Recorder Storage-->Choose the Drive Letter of your External HDD.

 

thanks for all the help guys... i too am now using a WD 250GB external hard drive for all my tv shows and music.

 

Yea using an external hard drive is alot better than using the computer hd.