SageTV and Digital Cable ?

[Bathel]

I have DirecTV so I don't have much info on using the PVR 250/350 on cable ...however, I'm looking to switch service.

I have a few questoins regarding the hardware.

1. With SageTV and the PVR-350 am I correct that you can only decode the first 125 channels of the Cable stream?

2. What happens at the end of 2005 when the Cable companies start to broadcast all channels digital ... will the encryption be open sourced so that Sage will be able to decode it or will you have to have a cable box for each card you have in your system?

3. How does SageTV look to handle HiDef recording ... i believe I have seen some betas for support for at least one HiDef Card ... but I have not seen much talk on if/how SageTV plans to move forward in this arena.

Thank you for any input you might have.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by Bathel
I have DirecTV so I don't have much info on using the PVR 250/350 on cable ...however, I'm looking to switch service.

I have a few questoins regarding the hardware.

1. With SageTV and the PVR-350 am I correct that you can only decode the first 125 channels of the Cable stream?

Sort of, the 350 (or 250) can record any of the analog channels directly, for some that's only those up to 99.

2. What happens at the end of 2005 when the Cable companies start to broadcast all channels digital ... will the encryption be open sourced so that Sage will be able to decode it or will you have to have a cable box for each card you have in your system?

No it's very unlikely anything in a PC will be able to record encryped content. It's far from open sourced. You'll need a cable box just like you do with satillite.

3. How does SageTV look to handle HiDef recording ... i believe I have seen some betas for support for at least one HiDef Card ... but I have not seen much talk on if/how SageTV plans to move forward in this arena.

Nothing official, there was experimental support for the AccessDTV and HiPix in v1.4, but not anymore in 2.0. If you want it vote for it (see my sig). My hope is that with the MCE compatible HD cards (BDA Drivers) those cards will either work out of the box, or with only slight modification, but that's just speculation/hoping based on current MCE cards working with Sage.

Thank you for any input you might have.

[andrewswright]

The PVR cards will only handle analog cable directly (1-99 or 1-125). However just like with DirectTv you can run analog inputs from the cable box to the PVR card. I use a serial cable to control my cable box from SageTV, but others use IR blasters.

Andrew