Help an STB newbie build a PVR that will work

[michelkenny]

Hello everyone,

In a month or two I will be moving out into my own apartment, so I need to look at building myself another PVR. At home right now we just have analog cable, so the PVR was very simple to built (2 PVR-500's and some MVPs).

In my apartment I will just have one TV, so I will just have one PC doing everything (recording and connected to the TV). Now I am going to be having digital cable, which means that I will have 1 or more STBs that my PVR will need to work with... I've been reading up on how to accomplish this, but the setup that I will have is a bit different, so I was wondering if you guys could help me to pick the right components that will work. I would like to avoid having to buy $500 of components only to find out that I can't use them.

The provider that I will most likely pick is MTS TV here in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The way MTS works is a bit different than other cable providers... instead of having 1 STB for each TV, or recording stream, there is only one central STB, or "hub" has they call it. The hub then connects to the room's existing coaxial cabling and outputs TV over three channels, say 3, 7 and 9 (kind of like a VCR outputs over channel 3). So if you have 3 TVs in your house, you just keep them tuned to 3, 7 or 9 and then use a remote to change what is being broadcasted onto that channel. Each TV gets it's own remote, with a small antenna attachment that plugs in between the coaxial cable and the TV. It takes the IR signal from the remote, tells the central hub to change channels, and changes the channel that the TV is receiving.

Now my question is how can I make a PVR work with this setup? I know that I will need some kind of IR blaster to let the computer tell the hub what channel to use. But everything I have read indicated that in addition you connect your STBs (what I read always has one per recording stream) to your computer either via rca/s-video or firewire. Firewire is not an option for MTS, nor is s-video or rca. The only way that I can see it working is with a coaxial input, one for each stream I want. My question was: if I input over coax, will Sage be able to use the ir blaster to tune channels, or does it need to be over s-video/rca? What I was thinking of getting is an Nvidia DualTV, which comes with two ir blasters. I was hoping just to connect my coax cable to the DualTV's input and configure the two ir blasters to change channels. I may need two PVR-150's or something like that if the antenna's cause problems...

Sorry for the long post, but any help would be appreciated because I can't live without a PVR anymore!

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by michelkenny

...there is only one central STB, or "hub" has they call it. The hub then connects to the room's existing coaxial cabling and outputs TV over three channels, say 3, 7 and 9 (kind of like a VCR outputs over channel 3). So if you have 3 TVs in your house, you just keep them tuned to 3, 7 or 9 and then use a remote to change what is being broadcasted onto that channel. Each TV gets it's own remote, with a small antenna attachment that plugs in between the coaxial cable and the TV. It takes the IR signal from the remote, tells the central hub to change channels, and changes the channel that the TV is receiving.

Now my question is how can I make a PVR work with this setup? I know that I will need some kind of IR blaster to let the computer tell the hub what channel to use. But everything I have read indicated that in addition you connect your STBs (what I read always has one per recording stream) to your computer either via rca/s-video or firewire. Firewire is not an option for MTS, nor is s-video or rca. The only way that I can see it working is with a coaxial input, one for each stream I want. My question was: if I input over coax, will Sage be able to use the ir blaster to tune channels, or does it need to be over s-video/rca?

It doesn't have to use svideo for an external receiver. You can connect via coax, tell it to tune to a specific channel to receive signals from an external box, then have it control the external box via IR.

BTW: the USB-UIRT can control up to 3 external STBs with the same IR codes, or more than that if they can be configured to use separate codes.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by michelkenny

Each TV gets it's own remote, with a small antenna attachment that plugs in between the coaxial cable and the TV. It takes the IR signal from the remote, tells the central hub to change channels, and changes the channel that the TV is receiving.

Are you sure that's an IR remote? Calling it an antenna makes it sound like RF, which is going to be much more difficult to integrate into Sage.

[michelkenny]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Are you sure that's an IR remote? Calling it an antenna makes it sound like RF, which is going to be much more difficult to integrate into Sage.

Now that I think about it, yes it is most likely RF since it is an actual antenna for each remote... I think I'm just going to stick with analog cable like we have here at my parents' house... then I don't have to deal with STBs or whatever. Thanks for the help guys.

[ke6guj]

I remember troubleshooting with a guy with a similar system a couple months back. And IIRC, the main TV output was controlled via IR, but that the 2 "remote" TV outputs were controlled via RF remotes, and there was a seperate RF code for each remote to match it to a specific TV output. THe antenna thingy was just a booster of sorts. If the antenna was a IR>RF converter, and the actual remotes were IR, then you'd probably be able to get it running. Unfortunately, nobody I know offers an RF blaster.