Let’s say that you spent hundreds of dollars to put together a home theatre computer. Such a computer may have two or three tuner cards to record two to three programs in parallel. In addition, it may have massive storage to record lots of programs, along with the processing power to transcode recorded programs to a more compact form.
It is great if you can spend some time in front of the 52-inch HDTV that the home theatre computer is connected to. However, you may not have time to sit in front of the big screen TV. Or, you may want to replay a program recorded in the home theatre computer, but on a smaller TV in the kids’ bedroom.
Or, you may be preparing dinner in the kitchen, and just want to watch or listen to a recorded program.
All of this can be done if you turn the home theatre computer into a multimedia server. Note that this is different from a file server. A multimedia server can transcode on-the-fly to save network bandwidth. With a network and the home theatre computer turned into a server, you can now replay any recorded programs on any networked computers. Or, if you so choose, you can also relay live programs captured by the tuner card(s) on-the-fly to any networked computer.