Newbie Questions

[johnnysoko@yaho]

I am really lost!

The guys at Frey have been great, but I think I'm wearing out my welcome with all the tech support questions.

I was originally having trouble getting all my channels to appear in Sage, until I figured out that half my cable channels are digital and half are analog and I can't plug the cable directly into my PVR-250. So now I have to get the Actisys IR-200L so Sage can control the cable box. This much I understand, but there are a few things I'm still confused about and I'd like to figure it out before I blow a bunch 'o cash on the missing parts (I also need to pick up a video card with TV out).

So.......If the only way for Sage to record something off a digital cable channel is to let Sage control the cable box with the Actisys, then how can I ever record two channels at once? I understand that I need another prv-250 to record a second channel, but how does my cable box fit into this scenario? What if I want a 3rd pvr-250?

And.....If my cable box is now being run by my computer through Sage, then I assume this means that I am always watching TV routed through the computer and am never going to be watching 'normal cable' again, right?

Lastly.....I know this is a stupid question, but I honestly just don't understand. Hopefully my asking will help other newbies reading these posts. If my video card is sending a TV out signal to my living room TV, then isn't it sending an exact copy of what's on my computer monitor? If this is the case, does this mean that whenever I am watching television, my computer must be running Sage in full screen mode? That can't be right, can it? What if I want to surf the Net while my girlfriend watches TV? How does the video card know to send the Sage window 'only' through the output and still let me run something else on the main monitor?!

My brain hurts

Thanks for any help.

[-LD]

that's the beauty of the digital cable racket...you will need additional cable boxes, conveniently available to rent from your cable provider, to tune and record additional channels...logically, you need a tuner for each channel you intend to watch and/or record at the same time...but i have no idea how sage would control multiple cable boxes

[Xleon]

What if I want a 3rd pvr-250?

You'll need to get a third cable box to provide an input signal to the third pvr-250 !

am never going to be watching 'normal cable' again, right?

You can still change channel and watch TV as a normal TV if you want. You're just giving Sage the option to change the channel for you and giving it an audio/video feed to record.

If my video card is sending a TV out signal to my living room TV, then isn't it sending an exact copy of what's on my computer monitor

It depends on the output card you are using. If your MPEG encoder card has a dedicated TV output, then the VGA monitor output will be unaffected. The TV output on the encoder card is a dedicated full-screen output.

If you are using the TV-Output on your VGA card, then yes, you will have to make the TV fullscreen to be able to watch it full screen. Unless you have a dual-head VGA card and it may be possible to have one showing the desktop and one showing Sage, though you can run in to all sorts of complications with this method.

[JJarmoc]

What I do, is split my cable line before the cable box. One end is connected directly the the PC, and the other end goes to the digital cable box, which then goes to the PC.

The non-box card doesn't get my full digital cable lineup, but with Sage I can configure it to have a different lineup of only the channels (analog) that it does receive.

While I still can't record two digital channels concurrently, I can record 1 digital and 1 analog concurrently. Since the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WGN) are available analog, as are my most frequently watched cable networks (HBO, TLC, History, etc..) I can usually avoid scheduling conflicts this way.

[johnnysoko@yaho]

Thanks for the help...I finally have a clear idea of what it takes to get this going.

[kiepert]

This was a BIG help....

[salsbst]

To sum it up: everything that johnnysoko@yaho suspected is actually true. He has done a nice writeup of some issues that commonly occur to newbies.

Aside: Is anybody out there controlling multiple cable boxes with one HTPC via SageTV? I can dream of ways to do this but I don't think that the SageTV EXE Tuner Plugin currently supports them...

....it would only need a "per 250" command line registry setting to do so, I think.