Recommend Setup For Me

[bleucube]

I have a dedicated HTPC hooked up directly to my TV. HTPC is running sagetv 6.4. I have Avermedia m780 PCIe tuner card. My Comcast Cable comes from the wall and gets split three ways. One goes into directly into my TV, One goes into my Analog port on m780 Tuner card and one goes into my Digital Port on m780. I cannot get the digital to show, but thats for another post. My Comcast subscription is digital and includes HD channels. In order to get these I must use the cable box. My M780 came with a usb ir blaster with two inputs. Can i do a setup that my digital cable goes into cable box and then to tuner card and channels are changed by cable box without affecting analog side? I would like to do all my live tv watching on analog and have all my recordings use the digital (once I get it working).

Does this sound like it will work?

[pjpjpjpj]

Do you have the cable box in the setup now (you weren’t really clear on that)? Also, is your TV digital (ATSC)/QAM ready, or just an older analog NTSC TV?

From your description, it sounds like you just need to put the cable box in the line from the splitter to the digital input of the tuner card, and then use the tuner card’s ir blaster to control the box.

So then you have that three way split with:
1) Straight cable to your TV set, which would either be the “live TV in analog” that you want, or else digital/QAM (depending on the type of TV you have).
2) Analog cable to your tuner card’s analog input, which Sage will play/record.
3) Digital cable to the cable box, then digital out of the box to your digital card input, where the ir blaster of the card will control the box channel tuning. Sage would play/record this as well (once you get it to show up, which you said was a separate issue for you).

Make sense?

[bleucube]

Thank you for the response,

I do have a cable box, but it is not setup now. I'm using the internal tuner of my television and the m780 to change channels. My TV is ATSC/QAM ready.


Your steps seem clear and make sense. So in Sage I can choose what tuner I want shows to record on?

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by bleucube

So in Sage I can choose what tuner I want shows to record on?

You can not directly assign a tuner per show. You can "prioritize" tuners, so that if several are available, it will use one before the other(s)... but this obviously will not work ideally in all cases. There are lots of posts on this topic in the "software" forum of this site.

[Tiki]

I am not familiar with the Avermedia card and I don't know the details of your cable box. However, I suspect that connecting from the output of the set top box (STB) to the digital input on the Avermedia card will not work.

In general, the output from most STB's is analog, not digital. If you are using the coax connector on the STB, it will be an analog signal modulated onto channel 3 or 4. If using the Component, Composite, or S-Video outputs it will be an analog signal (but not modulated). If using Firewire or HDMI it would be a digital signal, but not something that could be handled by an ATSC or QAM tuner card.

On the tuner card side, you have analog or digital. If it is a digital tuner, it will be expecting a digital signal in a program stream or transport stream format that has been modulated to some ATSC or QAM channel. It will use its tuner to separate out just the one channel you are interested in at which point it will have a digital stream that it can save directly to your hard drive.

If it is analog and coming in through the coax, the capture card has to demodulate the NTSC channel first. Then it has an analog signal to work with (if it is from the S-Video or Composite inputs it can skip this step). Once it has an analog signal, it must encode it into a digital signal that your computer can work with. It is usually encoded to MPEG-2, but there are other possible formats. The encoding can be done with a hardware chip on the tuner card or it can be done in software using the power of your PC's main CPU. Once it is encoded, it can be stored to your hard drive for playback.

So, if you try to stuff an analog signal into a digital input, it probably won't be able to demodulate (tune the channel) and it won't be able to encode it to a format that can be stored and played back.

There are some tuner cards that have hybrid connectors that can accept analog or digital into the same connector, but I don't think that is what you have.

So, to record from your cable box, you will probably need to connect the output of your cable box to the analog input on your capture card. If you have a choice, use an S-Video connection, otherwise use Composite (RCA Jack). If neither of these is available, last choice is the coax connection since it adds the extra step of having to tune into channel 3 or 4 with your tuner card and if the tuner isn't perfect you will get a snowy picture.

A lot of cards have both an S-Video and Coax input for the analog tuner, but only one can be used at a time on most of these cards.

Regardless of which connector you use, if you want to use an STB, you will need a way to change the channels on the Cable box. Some Tuner cards come with IR Blasters. Another popular method is to buy a device called USBUIRT, which is an add-on IR Blaster. Some people have also been successful using a serial cable or firewire cable to connect to the STB and change channels directly.

I hope this points you in the right direction...

[bleucube]

Tiki,

They you for you long informational post!!

My card has is a dual tuner analog and digital (supports qam). I've been using this for over a year (11 months of VMC and 1 month on SageTV). I'm using the internal tuner of my card to change channels. Prior to my HTCP I was using a tivo. So everything is working good.

I'm now working on my digital problem, and hence wanted to see once I got that working how what would be the recommend setup. Appreciate the advice and will keep it in mind!