best card for HD, Direct tv + sage?

[Teg]

Just moved. Had a nice set up for basic cable: hauppauge winTV PCI 350 + sage took care of the 90 or so channels quite well.

Now we have to have direct TV, which has ten bazillion channels, and we will probably upgrade to HDTV pretty soon. Since the 350 can't handle HD and I'm going to have to figure out the IR blaster thing anyway, I'm considering a major upgrade.

Recommendations as to hardware? Which card works well with Direct TV and HD? Which IR blaster package will interface between Sage and direct TV well?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Teg

Which card works well with Direct TV and HD?

There is no consumer-level card that can capture HD output from a satellite box. If you want to record satellite HD with Sage, you'll need a modified satellite receiver with a USB output. See the various R5000-related threads for details.

Edit: If you're in an urban area, you might look at over-the-air broadcast HDTV capture cards as an alternative to DirecTV.

[stanger89]

I think the R5000 does not work so well with DTV since it isn't compatible with the newer "MPEG-4" boxes.

Supposedly it works great with Dish though.

[GKusnick]

I have an R5000-modded Hughes E8 box that works just fine with DirecTV. You're right that it does not receive the MPEG4 channels, but since there aren't very many of those (yet) it's not a deal-breaker for me.