Spyware Protection is too good
 

Okay, so... Minifob broke the MythTV box. (He punished me for turning my back for two seconds by going and shutting the power off behind the TV. This very rude shutdown has apparently pissed off the database.) Mr. Clod can fix it from within our home network, so he was going to remote into my laptop to do it.

We were going to use this little bugger, Zolved Remote Control. Except every time I try to run it, something shuts it down immediately. I have Windows Firewall turned off completely, as well as my antivirus software (AVG Free 8.0). In theory nothing is protecting me, but something is still killing the remote session every time.

I know what I'm doing. I want my PC taken over, goddammit. Quit trying to help.

www.crossloop.com

Free
Works with windows
Plays nice with all my security software

Rsvp

question:

Is the target machine running xp or vista?

My machine, the one that keeps killing the remote session, is running XP Home. It's a moot point now, because he came home from work and fixed the MythTV box directly.

The idea that, once you've paid for a computer, you should be able to decide what it's going to do for you, as opposed to what various corporations decide it will be allowed to do for you, is becoming obsolete faster than a Pentium III.

I tried to help my dad hook up a printer last week. Crossloop and DimDim both kept knocking me offline after a couple minutes. It was very frustrating--and Crossloop had worked fine in the past.

what's mythtv? /technology averse guy/

It's software that turns a PC into a DVR ("Tivo" etc.). Very cool.

@Clod: How flexible is that software at searching for things that are/aren't scheduled to run, and queueing them to record if/when that occurs?

sounds cool, but why not just use a dvr? computers are more expensive than the dvr so cost isn't the issue is it?

It generally is only aware of the next two-three weeks' worth of TV schedules, so if you're trying to add a new show to the schedule you have to remember to do it just before it starts, so that Myth knows it exists. But once it's added, the title will just sit in your record list, and the next season will get recorded without having to re-add it. Adjusting the recording options of shows is easy--just this one showing, all episodes of this show, just the showing that comes on at X time on this channel, etc... but it can sometimes be a bit of a pain to search for new titles to add, because you usually have to do it alphabetically.

The initial cost of the computer is a little more, but then there's no monthly fee for the "service." (Well, effectively none, I think it's like $10 a year to download the TV schedules.) Plus, when you control the hardware and software, you can do handy things like add extra hard drive space, or burn recordings off to a DVD, which you can't do with a proprietary DVR.

Hmmm, makes sense. I have a DVR that I pay $5.99/month -but that is no extra charge over what my receiver would be anyway. I record my shows and games onto DVD just fine, so what is it I'm missing? Do you really store a lot on your unit? Right now I have @ 25 complete soccer games and the full season of Life on mine with a few other random things thrown in. (Limit your critique of my understanding to this subject please ;) - we don't have time to delve into all the gaps in my knowledge)

You have a good plan then. Around here, the "rental" of the box is $8/month and then the service itself is another $10/month. And you definitely can't burn off any of the data you record--I'm confused as to how your DVR does that, since I'm pretty sure it's copyright infringement.

I think we have an 80 GB drive, but the main reason we need so much space is we keep a lot of the kids' shows indefinitely. Once we watch ours we delete them, but they like to watch their shows again and again and again... Oh, I just remembered another feature of the homemade box: we have a second machine that is a slave to the first one, that lives upstairs and streams the data off the first machine over the network, so we can watch two recorded shows at the same time.

Cllod to record from a DVR just have a DVD burner in line ( Going to the tv ) , play and record . easy peasy ,
this sounds interesting , could be cool if you had a few Tbyte Drives linked together ( RAID ) ,
if you could also grab from a DVD drive , you could Potentially have ALL yer media on it ( Movies , Tunes , Etc,,,) avail to yer netwerk at any time

Our DirecTivo came with 80GB. I recently upgraded it to a 500GB drive.

Tivo brand still works with Direct TV ??
this last Christmas we got the Direct Tv brand DVR , i had heard that Tivo was going to STOP working with Direct tv after the first of the year ( be sides we got HD ) .
I miss Tivo , this DVR sucks !!!!

Existing boxes out in the wild didn't stop working. But DirecTV stopped selling units with Tivo software. We were lucky enough to get one right before the change.

There are rumors that DirecTV will do another deal with Tivo now that they're not owned by Rupert Murdoch (who had a DVR developed for Sky TV that he wanted to push) but I don't think anything's actually come of it.

We've seen the DirecTV DVRs at a friend's house. One of the satellite inputs on our unit is a little flaky, but we decided we'd rather live with it than get another box. (Besides, Fios will be in our neighborhood soon... so we want to leave our options open for that.)