DISH on SageTV?

[imloggedin]

Ive been searching google and reading posts about trying to get HD dish or cable or anything into a media center. Everything i read seems to be from 2006 or earlier though. Im sick of searching so im just gonna come straight out with it. I have an ATI HD 650 pci right now and it works fine for analog cable. I cannot figure out howto get SageTV to recognize clear QAM on it. My TV finds 5 clear QAM channels fine. I decide that im going to go with DISH though. I saw that you can get a R5000 box for like $500 (mod) + $200 (for the vip211). Theres no way in hell im doing that. Is their any other solutions for this? An HDMI input card or anything?

Thanks.

[matt91]

I think you'd want to wait for this:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29780

[imloggedin]

The HD PVR? What a waste that it takes a component input. Yuck. Anything else?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by imloggedin

The HD PVR? What a waste that it takes a component input. Yuck. Anything else?

The point is it would get ALL of your HD stations that you get on your box. Not just clear QAM. Not such a waste.

Gerry

[imloggedin]

yah i realize that, and i dont mean to sound rude. it just seems ridiculous that no one has come up with a way to get HD TV into a media center yet for a decent price. when i look at analog then switch to digital, looking at the same picture, you can tell quite a difference. almost seems like it would just be worth it to buy a dvr from dish and pay $6 a month.

[imloggedin]

no way to use a twinhan card http://www.twinhan.com/ or anything like that to pickup dish network directly? (legally)

[PGPfan]

Nope, not legally. Sorry. No way to connect an access card into the mix in such a way that Dish will approve it for use.

-PGPfan

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by imloggedin

Ive been searching google and reading posts about trying to get HD dish or cable or anything into a media center. Everything i read seems to be from 2006 or earlier though. Im sick of searching so im just gonna come straight out with it. I have an ATI HD 650 pci right now and it works fine for analog cable. I cannot figure out howto get SageTV to recognize clear QAM on it. My TV finds 5 clear QAM channels fine.

I don't believe the 650 support QAM tuning, I think it's ATSC (8VSB) only (oh, I see the card does, but apparently Sage doesn't support QAM on it).

Originally Posted by imloggedin

The HD PVR? What a waste that it takes a component input. Yuck. Anything else?

You're not thinking composite are you? Component is just as good as HDMI for this purpose, well better because Component doesn't support encryption while HDMI does.

Originally Posted by imloggedin

yah i realize that, and i dont mean to sound rude. it just seems ridiculous that no one has come up with a way to get HD TV into a media center yet for a decent price.

$250 is the same price I payed for my first real, hardware-encoding SD tuner back in the day (the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-PCI). It's not trivial recording raw HD.

when i look at analog then switch to digital, looking at the same picture, you can tell quite a difference. almost seems like it would just be worth it to buy a dvr from dish and pay $6 a month.

It could be, depends on your wants and needs.

Originally Posted by imloggedin

no way to use a twinhan card http://www.twinhan.com/ or anything like that to pickup dish network directly? (legally)

Dish (and DirecTV) encrypt basically 99% of their channels. While Dish uses basically a standard DVB-S system, their encryption is tweaked enough that it doesn't work with the DVB-S conditional access modules and they don't support any PC devices to decrypt their signals. It's quite annoying frankly.

[imloggedin]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Dish (and DirecTV) encrypt basically 99% of their channels. While Dish uses basically a standard DVB-S system, their encryption is tweaked enough that it doesn't work with the DVB-S conditional access modules and they don't support any PC devices to decrypt their signals. It's quite annoying frankly.

Thats such a shame that you cant just use a dish card and put it in a dvb-s pci card slot and be able to watch TV. Ive read that dish & dtv are working on something like that but rumors have been floating around awhile. Even if the hauppauge unit works great, you still have to deal with screen overlay.

BTW, wheres the list of supported cards for QAM in Sagetv?

thanks for the responses

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by imloggedin

wheres the list of supported cards for QAM in Sagetv?

I posted that for you yesterday here.

- Andy