Watching HD channels over dish on my PC?

[Endurance]

Hello all,

I've been reading forums all night and I am usually a tech/pc wizz. BUT this whole PVR HD DISH OTA thing got me pretty confused. I am looking for the following:

I have a media center PC, a Dish receiver (811) and a plasma TV. I want to be able to watch record and playback everything (including HD channels) using my PC -> use my PC as dish receiver. Is this possible?

I read something about a R500-HD from nextcom in conjunction with Sage TV.... no clue if this would do it though. I havent seen a solution that would get the HD signal from the box to the PC.

Please help

Thanks,
Daniel

[CanadianEh]

Hi Endurance,

I've been reading up a lot on this lately, as I've been going through the process of upgrading to HD. For Dish network, you will need to send out your satellite receiver to have it phyiscally modified (the R5000 solution). I *believe* this somehow adds a USB 2.0 port onto the sat box, and using their software, it will emulate a HDTV tuner within SageTV. This solution is the only solution to recording HD from Dish. Check their site (do a quick search for R5000 and find the main thread on this) just to verify that your model can accept this modification. Also, realize it costs somewhere around $500 per sat box.

Currently, since there still really isn't much HD programming out there, I'm getting by with an AverMedia A180 grabbing my local CBS, NBC, FOX, and PBS over the air using a small indoor UHF antenna.

Hope this helps a bit...

-Jay