[mythtv-users] silly question

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Nov 22 23:31:51 EST 2005


Michael T. Dean wrote:

> chris king wrote:
>
>> This is probably a stupid question, no doubt it has been answered in 
>> some random form at least 200 million times but I must know. Ok I 
>> used to have an ati all in wonder card, and I used to use the ati 
>> software tv bullcrap.Anyway it was limited to 125 channles, so for 
>> direct-tv i had to set it to channel 4 then record stuff. Where will 
>> the myth tv box need to sit in order to work with all of my channels 
>> on charter/dish/directv or will i need to do the channel 4 thing?
>
> Actually, the 125 channel limitation is imposed not by the ATI card or 
> any other tuner card, but by the cable TV standard.  OTA NTSC supports 
> 69 channels and cable TV supports 125.  Any system that supports more 
> channels than that is using some proprietary standard to transmit the 
> channels, and, therefore, requires a proprietary tuner (the DirecTV 
> receiver in this case).  Same holds for DISH network, for digital 
> cable, etc.
>
> So, your best picture would come from outputting S-Video from the 
> Set-Top-Box (STB) to the capture card.  If you really have multiple 
> sources (i.e. Charter, DISH, and DirecTV), you can connect them to 
> different inputs on the same card if you buy the A/V cable set ( 
> http://registration.hauppauge.com/webstore/hardware1.asp#av_cable ), 
> but it will only support two sources.  If you want more, you're 
> probably better off buying additional cards.

Before someone cries foul, I should explain that I mean it only supports 
two sources using S-Video/Composite.  If you have DISH, DirecTV, and 
analog Charter cable, you can plug DISH into the S-Video on the card, 
DirecTV into theS-Video on the A/V cable set, and Charter into the RF 
input on the card, but you can't do three STB's on the same PVR-150.  
And, yes, you could with a PVR-500, but each encoder on the 500 would 
only have access to at most two STB's, so that's no different from two 
150's.

Mike


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