Been Running Sage for over 7 years! Now cable will be all digital! Help?

[rickgode]

I live in Fort Worth, TX and Charter notified me that my cable tuners will no longer work as they are transitioning to an all digital format this summer. The specs for my setup are in my sig.

This setup as pretty much worked flawlessly this entire time and I'm trying to come up with solutions that will keep the functionality. I don't have HD TV so that's not a big issue.

Setup #1
Use my existing setup and see if charter will give me 3 STBs giving me a total of 4 (I already have one connected to one of the PVR 150's) This would seemly make everything like it was, but I can't see this happening or if it does, I don't want to "rent" them.

Setup #2
Get one of those Ceton 4 tuner cards I've been researching about. Reconfigure and tweak SageTV to use it and pray that everything Charter sends out will be copy freely. I don't really want to pay $200 for the new card and there is a chance I might not get it to work.

Setup #3
I just thought of this one. Get the Ceton 4 tuner card and put it in a windows 7 machine (which I guess will record stuff if it copy once?) Then have SageTV on my original machine, but map one of the video drives to the Windows 7 machine. That way my old MPV media extenders will still work with SageTV.

Setup #4
Windows 7 machine, Ceton card, Windows Media Center (I don't know if you can even do favorites or stuff haven't really researched it) Then get some low end computers as media extenders. I don't like this idea, because we have those hauppauge remotes floating all over the place and we use them for everything.

I hate change when everything is/has been working so well. Any other solutions? Maybe this isn't even in the correct sub forum?

Thanks,

Ricky

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by rickgode

I live in Fort Worth, TX and Charter notified me that my cable tuners will no longer work as they are transitioning to an all digital format this summer. The specs for my setup are in my sig.

This setup as pretty much worked flawlessly this entire time and I'm trying to come up with solutions that will keep the functionality. I don't have HD TV so that's not a big issue.

Setup #1
Use my existing setup and see if charter will give me 3 STBs giving me a total of 4 (I already have one connected to one of the PVR 150's) This would seemly make everything like it was, but I can't see this happening or if it does, I don't want to "rent" them.

Setup #2
Get one of those Ceton 4 tuner cards I've been researching about. Reconfigure and tweak SageTV to use it and pray that everything Charter sends out will be copy freely. I don't really want to pay $200 for the new card and there is a chance I might not get it to work.

Setup #3
I just thought of this one. Get the Ceton 4 tuner card and put it in a windows 7 machine (which I guess will record stuff if it copy once?) Then have SageTV on my original machine, but map one of the video drives to the Windows 7 machine. That way my old MPV media extenders will still work with SageTV.

Setup #4
Windows 7 machine, Ceton card, Windows Media Center (I don't know if you can even do favorites or stuff haven't really researched it) Then get some low end computers as media extenders. I don't like this idea, because we have those hauppauge remotes floating all over the place and we use them for everything.

I hate change when everything is/has been working so well. Any other solutions? Maybe this isn't even in the correct sub forum?

Thanks,

Ricky

Have you considered switching to ClearQAM? for the cost of 1 centon card you could easily get 2 or more HD Homerun 3s which each have 2 tuners in them. This would give you a total of 4 to replace the 4 you currently have. Another option might be the HD Homerun prime. I am not as familiar with these, but i do recall that they also have an either or tuner setup meaning either it works with cable card or you can use it as a ClearQAM/ATSC antenna tuner. The HDHRs would also give you the flexibility to go the cable card route should your needs change in the future.

http://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-HD...keywords=hdhr3

http://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-HD...keywords=hdhr3

[brandypuff]

btw, how did you feed the STB into the PVR150?

I can get two free digital boxes from Charter but these things look massive and wasn't sure how to connect or control them. How do you control the channel changes with them? Do you need one of those infrared adapter things?

Also, i recently saw a 4 tuner HD homerun box for sale for $150. Not a bad deal.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Setup #4
Windows 7 machine, Ceton card, Windows Media Center (I don't know if you can even do favorites or stuff haven't really researched it) Then get some low end computers as media extenders. I don't like this idea, because we have those hauppauge remotes floating all over the place and we use them for everything.
Ricky

Won't work. PCs can not be used as extenders for WMC. Only the Xbox360 and the new Ceton extender.

[Dargason]

In my area (Metro Saint Louis) Charter is copy freely, except for premium channels like HBO, Cinimax, etc.

I use a Hauppauge DCR-2650 for all my tuning. The only problem I've had is that I require a tuning adapter for some stations and it sometimes craps out and needs to be power cycled. However, I installed the latest firmware from Hauppauge about 10 days ago and haven't had the problem again, so maybe that's been fixed.

[brandypuff]

So SageTV can control the Hauppauge DCR-2650 box?

[Mitch G]

If Charter is copy freely (as indicated by the post above), then I recommend going the HDHomerun Prime and loading SageDCT. I recently did this and it's working extremely well.
You will need a windows 7 machine - either your Sage server or as a separate win7 machines for the SageDCT stuff.



Mitch

[rickgode]

Originally Posted by brandypuff

btw, how did you feed the STB into the PVR150?

I can get two free digital boxes from Charter but these things look massive and wasn't sure how to connect or control them. How do you control the channel changes with them? Do you need one of those infrared adapter things?

Also, i recently saw a 4 tuner HD homerun box for sale for $150. Not a bad deal.

My hauppage 150 card came with a little ir blaster cable, but the only one that worked was the last card I bought as the chipset looked different from my other two.

The other two pvr 150's only tune channels 1-100 and the 150 that is hooked up to the STB gets all the "digital" channels.

see pic http://www.rgode.homeftp.net:81/cake.../post.php?/480

Ricky

[rickgode]

Originally Posted by Mitch G

If Charter is copy freely (as indicated by the post above), then I recommend going the HDHomerun Prime and loading SageDCT. I recently did this and it's working extremely well.
You will need a windows 7 machine - either your Sage server or as a separate win7 machines for the SageDCT stuff.



Mitch

Thank you to everyone for your input and expertise! Specifically for Mitch, will I need a big machine or can I use something that will just run Win7? (I have several old Dell's around the house that are 5 or so years old)

Does the HDHomerun Prime card do "the encoding on the card" like my 150's do?

Does the HDPrime + SageDCT install "just work" I'm pretty Techie and not afraid to get in and do a bit of tweaking, but I want something to "just work"

Is the HDPrime card better than the Ceton one, because it works with SageTV naitvely?

Thanks again!

Ricky

[Mitch G]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Thank you to everyone for your input and expertise! Specifically for Mitch, will I need a big machine or can I use something that will just run Win7? (I have several old Dell's around the house that are 5 or so years old)

I'm not the expert here. I suggest doing a search for SageDCT to see what people have done. FWIW, I'm running SageDCT on a several-year old Core2Duo server that is also my SageTV server and a few other servers. And it works fine. Personally, I would try it with the best machine of your bunch and see what happens.

Does the HDHomerun Prime card do "the encoding on the card" like my 150's do?

As far as I know - yes.

Does the HDPrime + SageDCT install "just work" I'm pretty Techie and not afraid to get in and do a bit of tweaking, but I want something to "just work"

For me it just worked. The hardest part for me was realizing that the cable company had not enabled my expanded HD package. Once they fixed this, I was able to scan using HDHR's utilities and then with SageDCT installed Sage found the tuners and voila I was watching F1 in HD!

Is the HDPrime card better than the Ceton one, because it works with SageTV naitvely?

I have not used the Ceton product and so can't comment.

Thanks,


Mitch

[ThePaladinTech]

Thought I'd chime in as well-

I don't think you will need a big machine to do the SageDCT thing - I'm not sure though.

2nd - no, to the best of my knowledge there is no transcoding done... the stream is already digital so it just 'intercepts' it and dumps it to a file. Which is why I don't think you need a big machine. This I am 95% confident of.

3rd - Getting the cable card setup for me was a pain. not because it was hard but because my cable company was clueless. If anyone you talk to wants to "roll a truck" just hang up and call later and hopefully you will get a knowledgeable person. once I had a knowledgeable person it was a piece of cake.

4th- I have both a ceton and prime. both work great.

Edit: as always if you are doing comskip or ShowAnalyzer - that can use some horsepower.

[ThePaladinTech]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

Won't work. PCs can not be used as extenders for WMC. Only the Xbox360 and the new Ceton extender.

Also working on this... you can get Linksys, HP, and Dlink extenders on ebay (~$80). I've made some progress but at the moment my HD100 smokes the performance of the HP extender I have. I still have some work to do. I am however running my SageTV server and my Windows MCE machine as virtual machines. SageTV seems to behave better as a VM, but like I said I have lots of experience with SageTV and little with MCE, so a lot of this could be me.

Edit: I always end up editing - If you are running windows 8 the only extender that works right now is an xbox. Ceton is working on getting the echo to work with Win8 but as I understand it that is more up to Microsoft then ceton. as for the discontinued ones you can get on ebay, it's doubtful they will ever work with anything past win7

[Dargason]

Originally Posted by brandypuff

So SageTV can control the Hauppauge DCR-2650 box?

Yes, using SageDCT. It's basically a repackaged / rebranded HD HomeRun Prime.

[Dargason]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Thank you to everyone for your input and expertise! Specifically for Mitch, will I need a big machine or can I use something that will just run Win7? (I have several old Dell's around the house that are 5 or so years old)

Not especially, but I vaguely recollect bagavant saying that having plenty of CPU 'overhead' was a good idea. I have an i5-750 and haven't had any issues.

Does the HDHomerun Prime card do "the encoding on the card" like my 150's do?

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that cablecard tuners don't actually do any encoding or decoding -- they just decrypt and reencrypt. The file that ends up on your hard drive has the same format as what the service provider sent. This has some side effects:
- you can't control the recording quality, and the file sizes will probably be big.
- you may have several different formats. Fortunately SageTV seems capable of handling them all, but you might run into issues if you want to transcode stuff. I also haven't run into problems with comskip not working.
- closed captions and 5.1 audio are preserved.

Does the HDPrime + SageDCT install "just work" I'm pretty Techie and not afraid to get in and do a bit of tweaking, but I want something to "just work"

I found it to be pretty straightforward. Easier than setting up my HD-PVR.

Is the HDPrime card better than the Ceton one, because it works with SageTV naitvely?

Not sure what you mean by this... I don't think sageTV handles any CC tuners 'natively.'

Overall, I've been very pleased with my CC tuner. MUCH more reliable than the HD-PVR I was using, plus better audio and captions. The main fear I have is that stations will start flagging programs, and then I'll be forced back to the HD-PVR.

[Fuzzy]

Which way to go would depend on your viewing habits, and how many of the channels you need to record are copy limited by your provider. You may find that it is a low enough number, that the Ceton card or HDHomeRun Prime would get you most your recording duties, and a single HD cable box and an HD_PVR or Colossus could handle the few remaining protected channels via component capture.

[rickgode]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Which way to go would depend on your viewing habits, and how many of the channels you need to record are copy limited by your provider. You may find that it is a low enough number, that the Ceton card or HDHomeRun Prime would get you most your recording duties, and a single HD cable box and an HD_PVR or Colossus could handle the few remaining protected channels via component capture.

I think this is exactly what I'm going to do. I'll probably go with the HDHomeRun Prime card and stick with my PVR150 to handle the protected channels via component capture.

Just throwing this out there (I haven't even searched it yet so sorry) Will I be able to watch live streams through the HDHomerun Prime? For example: would one of my extenders be able to change the channel on the HDHomerun Prime box using SageTV?

Thanks again everyone!

Ricky

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Just throwing this out there (I haven't even searched it yet so sorry) Will I be able to watch live streams through the HDHomerun Prime? For example: would one of my extenders be able to change the channel on the HDHomerun Prime box using SageTV?

Thanks again everyone!

Ricky

Assuming your extender is a SageTV extender, then the answer is yes. Once you install the HDHomerun Prime and SageDCT, the HDHomerun Prime functions and is controlled exactly the same way as any other tuning device in SageTV.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by rickgode

I think this is exactly what I'm going to do. I'll probably go with the HDHomeRun Prime card and stick with my PVR150 to handle the protected channels via component capture.

The PVR150 can't do component capture. It can do analog tuning, composite, or s-video. If you are going to use it, I would at LEAST recommend using s-video instead of composite - there is a huge quality improvement. The HD-PVR or colossus I mentioned can capture from component video, which would give you full HD capabilities.

[rickgode]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

The PVR150 can't do component capture. It can do analog tuning, composite, or s-video. If you are going to use it, I would at LEAST recommend using s-video instead of composite - there is a huge quality improvement. The HD-PVR or colossus I mentioned can capture from component video, which would give you full HD capabilities.

You're right. What I meant to say is I will still use my 150 with its IR blaster that controls the Charter STB which is hooked via RCA cables to said PVR150 to record the copy once programming. Whew, say that three times fast.

I was also able to get a hold of a Dell 530 with 6 gigs of ram and an intel core 2 duo that's 2.8 ghz. I think that should be plenty!

Hopefully this summer I'll post back when everything is complete.

Ricky

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by rickgode

You're right. What I meant to say is I will still use my 150 with its IR blaster that controls the Charter STB which is hooked via RCA cables to said PVR150 to record the copy once programming. Whew, say that three times fast.

I was also able to get a hold of a Dell 530 with 6 gigs of ram and an intel core 2 duo that's 2.8 ghz. I think that should be plenty!

Hopefully this summer I'll post back when everything is complete.

Ricky

The only drawback to this method is that the recordings will not be HD quality. There is a HUGE difference between the analog cable you have been getting and the digital cable you are about to get (even if it is not HD). I'm afraid that once your family sees the digital signals, they will not want to watch the poor recording quality that the PVR150 is going to provide.

Of course it doesn't hurt to start out that way, but if the recording quality just isn't up to speed, then you will have to get the HD-PVR to record the output of your cable STB via component video which is a much higher quality. The HD-PVR even records HD resolutions up to 1080i which is the highest resolution that your cable box is going to output anyway,.

You should have no problems running the software on that dual core computer you where able to get.