Recorder with network support?

[bad_back]

Hi,

Please forgive my ignorance with my question, I have searched this and other forums and not seen anything related, yet. Perhaps my search criteria has been bad

Are there any DVD recorders/players available that have network support. I'd like to be able to watch stuff that I have stored on my network server. It would be even better if I could save to the network server too

I currently have a TV tuner card upstairs that does the recording. The drawback is that I have to have the PC on to record. This is not ideal when the wife wants to use the PC; she can't watch anything whilst surfing the net, etc.

Downstairs, by the TV, I have a PC that plays any recorded/downloaded items via my network. I would like to replace this with a dedicated read/write DVD recorder with network support. Are there hardware out there to do this?

I suppose I could add a TV card to the downstairs PC but I'd rather not.

Thanks,
b_b

[oldfart13]

I haven't seen any for the North American market. The Japanese versions all seem to have them but the feature gets removed for foreign markets. No idea why. People at the last CES got no answers from the companies involved...

[bits]

I record TV shows to my HDD using a PVR250 PCI capture card. It has onboard hardware mpeg encoding and only uses a few percent of the cpu when recording without video display. My PC is also hooked to a Linkplayer2 via a LAN cable. We can watch recorded shows from my PC hard drive, record a new show and cruise the internet simultaneously. CPU usage is less than 25% while doing all of the tasks together.

My point is that by using a capture card that has onboard hardware encoding you do not need much cpu and most networked media players, such as the Linkplayer2, use very little of your systems resources.

I have had this setup for about 3 months now and I really enjoy it. I record what my family wants to watch, cut commercials and then we watch it when we want to watch it.