Other Capture Cards (DTV)

[RedDom]

Are there any digital tv (terrestrial) that work with sage tv. I know there are none that are officially supported, but are there any that work.
What does a card need to do so that it might work with sage tv.

Digital cards such as the nebula digitv and the hauppage ones directly capture the mpeg stream as broadcast over the air, so although they are not 'mpeg encoding' cards the result is an mpeg stream. I would like to add the uk dtv channels to my sage tv.

thanks

RD

[Narflex]

Sage already has the ability to playback files recorded with those cards. I'm actively looking for feedback on that.

If you're successful with playback, then there's potentially a way to make use of the card with SageTV.

[RedDom]

Assuming play back works OK (I think the card I'm looking comes with the elecard decoder).
What sort of integration could I expect? Would i be able to use the dtv card for watching, pausing live tv etc. Would sage be able to use it for recording. Could it change the channels automatically, or would i need to configure girder to send ir to change channels or the dtv card?

thanks

RD

[Narflex]

It all depends upon the drivers available for the card. If they're standard DirectShow drivers, then Sage might be able to understand it as is and utilize it fully. Otherwise, a proxy application would need to be written to translate the encoding commands from Sage to the DTV card (actually pretty easy if you know TCP/IP and can write code).

[RedDom]

I got the following reply from nebula, who kindly tried sage tv with their card, although only the analogue side which did not work. They have also sent me a sample of the recorded mpeg stream that i can use for testing playback. I don't really understand all of the answer but heres what they said.

thanks for your e-mail!
<QUOTE>
Unfortunately our digital side is not implemented in quite the same way as
old analogue cards. We do use the WDM driver model for the digital side but
it is only an access point for our software to access the digital data
stream. It therefore doesn't work with the standard DirectShow theories (in
fact digital cards have their own driver model for use with these kinds of
subsystems and it is called the BDA driver model) as we instead use all of
our own code to translate the incoming signal in to a visible picture and
sound (i.e. no DirectShow at all, other than for analogue).

As such I don't think it will be able to work with Sage.tv without us either
changing our software (which isn't going to happen as that would mean a
complete software rewrite) or the people behind Sage.tv adding in support
for our card by adjusting their software by applying to us for access to the
DigiTV SDK for our PCI cards (currently only available to very interested
parties in a very cut down form). Home Media Networks (the people behind
ShowShifter) have followed this path already and thus it might be possible,
but do remember that Sage.tv is implemented in Java so this may prove to be
a problem.

All I can say at the moment is that our own software is improving all the
time and thus the items you mention will eventually be implemented. We are
indeed working on adding in support for multiple cards, video over lan, as
well as some more advanced Tivo like intelligent recording features, thus
you should hopefully have all that you ask for at some point in the future.
As such please feel free to keep an eye on our website as we will detail any
new features that have been implemented in a software update on there.
</QUOTE>