I am a newbee at networking and media centers so please bare with me. I have an Atom 8TB home server with Windows, N router, each room has a Revo 3610 with a 330 dual core running Windows 7, total of four rooms. I want to hook up antenna for local stations only. Should i put a TV Tuner on each computer or just one Network TV Tuner on the router or server? if so, can i stack multible tuners so that different channels can be accessed and recorded at the same time? ALso, i will be running XBMC or WMC on each of the computers or can/should i run XBMC Live on the server? I would prefer to run everything thru a media center.
The tv tuner question has to be looked at a few different ways. Are you going to be using a tv tuner card that is dependent on your cpu for encoding or one that has its own hardware encoding built in. What is the form factor of your htpc's. I have two micro atx and one itx. The itx couldn't have a tuner on it due to size restrictions. A lot to think about. Remember xbmc won't decode tuner signals. I would put xbmc on every computer and not on your server. It doesn't need it on their to find the files. My system has all my htpc's drawing the media from my desktop server which stays on all the time. It doesn't run xbmc. Windows seven actually makes this pretty easy with home groups. Grab the samba shares from within xbmc and your off to the races.