HVR as a temporary HD-PVR?

[aflat]

While my HD-PVR is out being rma'd I hooked my STB to the component in of my PVR-500, and continue to use firewire to change channels. This allows me to record all the premium channels, as if the HD-PVR was still there, but it's not as good quality wise. (it does get me 3 tuners for the price of 1 card though, which is nice, and I think using 2 daughter cards would get me 2 more tuners)Especially the HD channels, they are all postage stamped(pillarbox and letterboxed) If I had a HVR-2250, could I do the same thing, but it would know how to handle the aspect ratio, or is the component in on those cards only able to handle SD?

I know the quality still won't be as good, but its a temporary thing for now, and allows me a stopgap until the wife allows another HD-PVR into the budget.

[gplasky]

Those cards don't have compnent in. They have composite in or s-video in. Neither of those are a HD input.

Gerry

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by aflat

While my HD-PVR is out being rma'd I hooked my STB to the component in of my PVR-500...

Neither the PVR500 nor the HVR2250 has component input. They have SD composite video input, which is not the same thing (although it uses the same style of RCA connector). Composite video is always 4x3, so it's your STB, not the tuner card, that's doing the letterboxing of 16x9 content. Sage is then pillarboxing the 4x3 signal during playback to fit your 16x9 screen. You can't prevent the letterboxing, but you can hide the bars offscreen by choosing an aspect ratio mode in Sage that zooms the entire picture so that the center part fills the screen.

Originally Posted by aflat

(it does get me 3 tuners for the price of 1 card though, which is nice, and I think using 2 daughter cards would get me 2 more tuners)

No, it wouldn't. There are still only two tuners on the card, and configuring more than one input per tuner doesn't change that. Sage will still throw a conflict if you try to record more than two channels at once.