Best TV tuner card for Thinkpad? Windows Media Center setup?

Hi all,

I've been wanting to get a TV tuner card and set up Windows Media Center around the house, and maybe run some kind of server (Windows Home Server?) to where all TV's and computers always have access to all content.

I'm also interested in recording TV for the purpose of time and place shifting, i.e. watch whatever content on any TV, any computer (monitor), laptop, and on the road or when either of us is out of town on our mobile devices.

What's the best way to go about this and get started? Thus far, I've had great success with equipment from SlingMedia, which has been highly useful for watching local content from my cable box either live or by way of DVR using a SlingBox. I currently use it to watch a few programs available only through another market's local channels and it works great, but I mostly use the SlingBox when I'm traveling.

Ever since Vista came out, I've been wanting to get into this more, but never got around to it. Now that I have the time, and with Windows 7's improved Media Center experience, what do I need to obtain and set up in order to basically hotwire my house with all this fun stuff.

For one, I guess I need a TV tuner card, so instead of wasting time and money, I'd like to make intelligent decisions as to what equipment I need to get, which brand, which one might be overkill, other stuff to look out for, etc. For example, there's Apple TV. I read recently that it's not that successful, but still worth pursuing according to Steve-oh!

Thanks very much! I'm looking forward to getting into this.

 

I have a USB TV tuner (WINTV-HVR 950Q) from Hauppauge right now. It was actually packaged under Nero LiquidTV, but I just stuck with Window Media Center software. I'm running this setup on my T400, with a P8700 processor and 4GB ram.

It does its job, but I don't think is has hardware decoding so it uses 60-80% of the CPU at times. Temperature runs to 60 degrees Celsius! Aside from the few hiccups, its been doing pretty well.

 

I'm using a Mini PCI-E Avermedia A301 TV tuner, completely integrated and i now have the antenna just routed under the keyboard and it sticks out just a little above of the camera flash memory card reader, really pro job i think i did, looks like the thing came with the unit. No need to worry about whitelisting of these cards in the BIOS, at least not for this one, and it fits just snugly, perfectly.