Need new tuner card recommendation and have a audio question

[JoeDiRT]

It been about three months now since I bought my HD100 and have gotten pretty familiar with it. I had some problems up front that I was able to identify but still am having some problems that I would like to work out. After reading and searching through the forums, I have determined that the Pinnacle HD card I have is basically worthless and need to buy a supported HD card. My first question is what card seems to be the best card that works with the HD-100??
My next question is fundemental but I need to ask just to make sure I am hooking up my cable box correctly to my PC. On the back of my digital HD cable box there is a coax output that I am hooking up to the input of my tuner card. Is this correct? The reason I ask is when I did this the tuner card software and Sage only see one channel which was the last channel I was watching when I pulled the cable box from the TV.

Lastly, I have read a few posts on lagging audio on recordings and I am also having a lagging issue but happens much later in recordings (not right away). Part of me thinks that this could be because of the tuner card but its just a guess at best. Anyone else having the same issue with audio lagging only after awhile watching recordings?

Thanks in adavance

[pjpjpjpj]

I can't answer definitively, but I can say this: the coax out of the back of your HD Cable box is most likely NOT an HD signal. I have never heard of HD passing from an STB to a TV via coax (I don't think it is possible after transcoding in the box, because it would require too much compression?). Can you try it with component or HDMI connections?

As for your second question, I have heard of such things happening with certain, uh, "cheaper" tuner cards. If yours is not even supported by Sage, that sounds like a likely culprit.

[paulbeers]

As pj stated, if you are hooking your STB to the coax of a capture card, that is by far the worst way to do it.

First off, the only way to capture true HD from an STB is to use the HDPVR (or R5000 mod if you happen to have a supported STB). You can use a capture card with Svideo for a decent picture, but it still won't be in HD. I would recommend either going the route of an HDPVR or trying to find a PVR150 (or HVR1600) if you are going to be happy with SD quality.

Secondly, you are only going to get the channel you manually tuned your STB to, unless you use a USBUIRT or some other channel changing method. The box isn't going to just know when and where to change a channel to.

Third, as pj stated, it is probably due to the poor capture card you are using that you are seeing audio lag. I used to have a very basic software encoder that required audio to be routed directly to the sound card. This caused the video and the audio to come into the computer at different times and so I never had good audio sync.