I will soon be completing a Ceton quad-tuner card/WMC/W7U64/xBox360S setup to record and watch programs from my PC. I will be starting a job soon that requires my being on the road 5 days a week and I want to know if there is a way that I can watch my programming from the road from my laptop.
No. This is not "Slingbox", it's WMC.
You can play TV recordings (a) on the monitor connected to your HTPC in which the Ceton card is installed, and (b) on any outboard TV's connected on your home LAN via "media center extenders".
Assuming you have remote access to your home PC while you're away with your laptop (using RealVNC, or Remote Desktop, or something else which supports file transfers) you could COPY any "unprotected, copy-freely" WTV recordings from the HTPC to your laptop and play those unprotected WTV files on your laptop using Windows Media Player on your laptop. But these are quite large (depending on duration, they could typically be 1-13GB in size, with about 5GB typically for a 1-hour HD program).
And, even if you copied them from your home PC you could still not play these WTV files on your laptop if they were "protected, copy-once" (as marked by your cable provider) WTV files. These are ONLY playable on your home PC that did the recording, and also on a "media center extender" around the house.
I've not used Media Center before...does my PC have to be on for recording and playback as described above or does it "awaken" by itself? Thanks!!!
I've not experimented with sleep vs. hibernation, and auto-waking to make recordings. I've chosen just to leave my Ceton-equipped HTPC on 24/7 even when I'm away. I just turn all peripherals (like monitors, sound, etc.) off and leave the computer itself on.
This also allows me to connect to it remotely when I'm away (I use RealVNC), just to be sure everything is operating smoothly or if I need something from that PC. I don't have "wake on LAN" enabled in my BIOS, but that might be a way to let it sleep/hibernate and still wake it up from remote.
As far as WMC auto-waking the machine from sleep/hibernate for recordings, I would bet that this WOULD take place (though I haven't tried it). I do know Win7 can auto-wake a hibernating machine to apply its 3AM "Windows Updates" if you don't disable that option, so I can't see why WMC wouldn't or couldn't do the same thing.
I don't use that approach because I have an APC UPS, and coming out of sleep/hibernation causes much confusion for both the UPS and Windows and my machine. I just prefer to leave the machine on 24/7 and forget about it, being willing to live with the extra electricity costs and minor but eventual wear-and-tear on the machine from always being on.
Also, WMC goes through a twice-daily (3PM and 3AM, approximately) Guide update (fed by Microsoft, which is fed from its Zap2it TV listings database provider) on your machine. So even if you're not recording anything WMC becomes (or wants to become) active twice a day for a while.
I'd just leave it on 24/7, but others might have another perspective or solution to the sleep/hibernate impact on what I've described above.
