Which Way would you go?

[pat_smith1969]

I am moving into a new house (first time home owner !!!) and with that move I am taking the opportunity to change the way I watch TV.

For the past two years I have had a MCE machine on every TV with it's own tuner and large hard drive. Some TVs have a Cable Set Top Box others do not. This worked well for what it did. And with My Movies 2 I have been able to view my media library on any TV.

Now I want to centralize the whole shebang. I am going with one central Sagetv server with 4 tuners in it.

My question is this...
Using Cable TV should I get the four Cable Set Top Boxes and connect them to the TV Tuner Cards via a SVideo cable?

I know if I just plug in the cable to the tuner card it will work and we will get up to channel 120 or so, which is fine with us. But I have noted that the picture quality is not what it could be this way. Since I will be going to a 50 inch plasma soon the quality is getting more important (currently have a 32' CRT).

I also know that if I use the Cable STBs there is a HUGE problem with it not changing to the correct channel all the time. Our TIVO frequently "forgets" to change to the proper channel.

SO...
Which way would you go if you were in my shoes?
1. No STB with degridated vid quality but 100pct acuracy.
2. STB with better vid quality but only 90pct acuracy, and additional cost from comcast.

[MeInMaui]

My suggestion would be to get a couple of cable boxes and make sure they have active firewire ports. You can then set up to change channels via the firewire connection. In my experience, this has been 100% accurate. I would also suggest considering a HDHomeRun if you like to watch a fair number of shows on the major networks. As long as your cable co. isn't inappropriately encrypting them, this would allow you access to unencrypted QAM to record your locals in HD. You might even pick up a few additional channels as well (I get 27 channels this way). With our viewing habits, the dual tuners on the HDHR allowed us to get away with only getting 2 additional cable boxes. (Just to play it safe, I also have one PVR150 connected directly to analog cable.) HTH

Aloha,
Mike

[paulbeers]

Well, it is entirely up to you how you connect your cable to your STB. Around here, the lower "100" channels are still analog even when you use Digital and the only digital channels are those over "100", so that for here, if all you care about is the lower 100, then no reason to use the STB's. Another option, is maybe you only want to use 2 STB's. You can set Sage to use two channel lineups. I do it currently with cable for one of my dual tuners and the other dual tuner does SD OTA (my locals are horrible on my cable system). Sage shows one guide for the two set ups and decides which tuner it needs to do which channel (it also becomes even more complicated when you add in my HD OTA so then it is "melding" 3 different lineups). As far as tuning STB's, I don't use STB's for my Sage setup (I did for a short time) and I had no problem with changing the channel, but others will have to advise on how the current Sage software does with it (although judging by how little I have seen complaints on these forums, I don't think you should be concerned IF you do it right).

[davephan]

You didn't mention if your walls are still open... If they are still open, you should pre-wire the house with several eithernet, coaxial, audio, and telephone lines.

I am not the original owner of my home and I am opening walls now to run wires so that I don't have to use wireless eithernet to stream video to media extenders.

Dave

[pat_smith1969]

I do have a HDHomerun and love it. I only get six channels last count though.

I have read a lot about using firewire to change channels on a STB and intend to try it when we move in... but it has been my experience that the Cable co. will give me whichever STB box they want and I have no say in weather or not the firewire port is open. I hope it is.

As far as my house goes... the walls are all closed up but that doesnt bother me, I will have my whole house wired before we move in. I will be able to do this without taking down any drywall. I have tried the wireless thing and am a firm believer that wireless is good only for web browsing, I have never gotten it to work wellenough for video.

My setup, when all is said and done I will have TWO haupapuge two tuner pci cards, and a HDHomerun.