Switching to Dish, A few questions for other users.

[camus]

We are moving and I thought it was time to switch Sat. providers. As I was packing things up I realized I don't have a IR blaster from my pvr-150 (mce version) and I will be losing my serial control. So my questions.

1. Anyone have success using the blaster from an MCE USB IR to control a vip211 using the various custom tools for sage?

2. For you r5000 users, I am planning on modding on box and use the other through the pvr-150. How does Sage deal with the lineups and will it give precedent to the R5000 over the 150? ie, will it know that one is really HD and the other isn't?

Any other tips, tricks, suggestions from other users with similar setups are welcome. Thanks.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by camus

2. For you r5000 users, I am planning on modding on box and use the other through the pvr-150. How does Sage deal with the lineups and will it give precedent to the R5000 over the 150? ie, will it know that one is really HD and the other isn't?

Not a 5000 user, but do use a firewired STB which effectively works the same way.

YOu will need to use two lineups. One for the 5000 and one for the 150 so that you can enable/disable the channels that each source gets on its specific lineup. Sage will then combine the two lineups into one master guide.

YOu can then set the encoder_merit property setting for the 5000 to tell Sage that you prefer to use the 5000 first.

As for knowing if it is HD, that is determined from the lineup. If the data in the lineup shows that a specific show on a channel is in HD, then Sage will prefer to record from an HD channel before recording from an SD channel (I believe that that behavior can be enable/disabled on a global scale. It would be nice to be able to enable/disable that per favorite.)

[briands]

Originally Posted by camus

We are moving and I thought it was time to switch Sat. providers. As I was packing things up I realized I don't have a IR blaster from my pvr-150 (mce version) and I will be losing my serial control. So my questions.

1. Anyone have success using the blaster from an MCE USB IR to control a vip211 using the various custom tools for sage?

2. For you r5000 users, I am planning on modding on box and use the other through the pvr-150. How does Sage deal with the lineups and will it give precedent to the R5000 over the 150? ie, will it know that one is really HD and the other isn't?

Any other tips, tricks, suggestions from other users with similar setups are welcome. Thanks.

1) I use the USB UIRT for IR for three (used to be 4) Dish boxes. Very easy to set up since you can configure the Dish boxes to respond to one of 16 different code sets.

2) I would use the same guide for both receivers since they will both be capable of tuning all of the same channels. I have used a 211 with Svideo capture for over a year and the SD recordings of HD programs look very good even on my projector. I just got my r5000 installed and it seems to have priority over the other previously installed 211 even though they both have merit set to 0. Supposedly the merit setting will allow you to set priority, but what that really means is that it will be used first, but you may care more about what comes second... so I don't think it is very useful when programs overlap.

[camus]

Thanks, guys.

briands, on 2) that is exactly what I was asking, current with my dtv and hdhr it will always select the hdhr if the same show is on both, so I was hoping it to be the same with the 2 dish boxes.

Thanks again, I have got to finish packing.