[mythtv-users] Adding a second satellite/cable box

Brian Johnson bjohnson at johnson-engineering.ca
Mon Nov 17 10:21:27 EST 2003


Here is my understanding of cable and satellite boxes - they control the channel and
only feed that one channel through to the myth box.  You would need one video input
card for each device to be connected.

With this hardware, a line in (video and audio) is all that is required on the
computer.  A TV tuner card would not be used for anything but grabbing the one
channel of input and seems kind of a waste of resources, but video grabbing cards
that don't include tuners cost about the same anyway.  I don't think there are any
economical computer cards to directly receive satellite signal and you run into
encryption and security issues.

To change the channels you need a method (hardware and maybe software) to change the
channel on the cable or satellite box itself.  With multiple feeds into the
computer, the myth channels could be used to select which feed to display.

I haven't found any more economical hardware than a myth setup that maps feeds onto
a certain channel (eg map a satellite feed onto channel 21 of your cable feed)

Each line could use splitters, so you could have the normal cable split to the cable
box and the computer tuner card (assuming you need the cable box for something else
since the tuner card is all you need for the myth setup) or you can split the
satellite feed to multiple receiver boxes (assuming the LNB supports this .. most
new ones seem to) for signal decrytion and output from the selected channel

As soon as you start dealing with satellite systems, controlling it through the PVR
becomes complex.  You could however just treat the PVR as a VCR and just record on
whatever channel is being fed through it but control the channel selection via the
remotes that came with the other boxes, but like a VCR on a satellite system, it
cannot change the channel of the satellite box unless the hardware supports it (in
my experience most do not)



Adrian Burden (aburden at onegeeksopinion.com) wrote:
>
>You need a separate cable run, make sure you have a dual LNB at the dish
>or you will need to upgrade that also.
>
>Jason Hunt wrote:
>
>>Greetings,
>>
>>Let's say that I get another satellite box so I can get MythTV to record a
>>show when I am watching something else at the scheduled recorded time.
>>
>>My question is about the hookup.  I have the coax going into satellite in on
>>the first satellite box, so what would I put in the satellite in on the
>>second box?  Will a splitter work in this situation?  Or do I require
>>something else?
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>your cable box only tunes to one channel at a time, so whatever it was
>>>sending to the TV it was also sending to your PVR-350.  There's no way
>>>to get around that, other than getting a second cable box.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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>>
>>
>



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