Do you have to have a receiver?

[wvueers]

I badly want a DVR. My apartment building pays for cable so I have no cable box. Do you need one for SageTV to work, and if you do, what are my other options for having a DVR?? Thanks.

[Polypro]

If you have a cable that comes out of the wall, it can be plugged into a tuner card on an HTPC to give you DVR functionality. Split it to 2 or more tuner cards, and you can watch 1 channel while recording another, etc... There is also QAM and OTA HDTV programming that may be available to you...lots of possibilities, read, read, read.

P

[Addict]

I have a somewhat related follow-up question here... I'm currently controlling my STB with a USB-IRT because my controller card (Hauppauge 350) will only tune channels 1-100. Are there cards out there that will tune more than this?

It'd be nice to get rid of the IR-relay delay...

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by Addict

I have a somewhat related follow-up question here... I'm currently controlling my STB with a USB-IRT because my controller card (Hauppauge 350) will only tune channels 1-100. Are there cards out there that will tune more than this?

It'd be nice to get rid of the IR-relay delay...

The issue is not so much how many channels it can tune but how it tunes channels. Your card can handle analog ntsc channels. What you are most likely after is something that can tune the digital channels that your STB is tuning into. These are QAM channels. There are QAM tuners out and available, one I like is the HDHomerun. Note though non of the QAM tuners out can handle anything but unencrypted QAM or ClearQAM. Most of the channels that a cable company provides will not work. The exception to this is your locals. I use an HDHomerun to get my HD locals over QAM on my local cable, the only non-HD digital cable channel I could tune was the Comedy channel for some reason.