Digital Cable Box Setup

[dadams]

I currently have one PC running SageTV (Server) with 2 PVR-250's. The specs for this machine are Athlon 2200+, 1Gb Ram, 3/4Tb storage.

In my living room I have a PC with a PVR-350(used for output), AMD64 3200+, 1Gb Ram, 300Gb Hard Drive, 9600XT Video Card. I am running the Sage Client and Recorder for Network Encoding.

I would like to connect 2 Digital Cable boxes to my SageTV server through the PVR-250 inputs. As I understand it, I will need a USB-UIRT device to control the cable boxes and I would set up the S-Video inputs as separate inputs and disable the analog channels. Is that correct? At the same time I will be adding a PVR-500 card.

If so, it would record the analog source through the Tuner and the Digital Channels (100+) through the S-Video. Correct?

I was wondering, if the above is true, could I possibly be recording an analog and digital channel at the same time or will Sage use one or the other. (And is it smart enough to distinguish?)

That all being said, if I am in my living room and want to watch a digital channel, will it automatically pick a s-video source and change the channel for me using the USB-UIRT?

Thanks,

Dennis

[ToxMox]

No you can't record on both inputs of a 250 at the same time and Sage is smart enough to distinguish. What I did for my cable box which I set up the same way you want to is that I set that tuner to have the lowest priority so that would leave it for digital stuff mostly unless Sage absolutely had to use it for an analog recording.

Yes to the last question too.

[Wheemer]

Are you analogue channels available on your digital boxes? If so you wouldn't need to setup anything but the usb-uirt and the svideo connections on your 2 pvr 250s. Then use your pvr 500 for two additional analogue inputs and your pvr 350 as a third.

Should work out well.

[ToxMox]

You are correct Wheemer. I personally prefer using the analog input for analog channels and the s-video for only the digital channels because I don't have to rely on the cable box being on or the usb uirt to correctly change the channel and the channel change happens quicker for analog shows.

[dadams]

Thanks for all of your help. I appreciate it. I will probably take Toxmox's suggestion of lowering the priority of the 250's. I'm assuming the quality of the 500 is the same as the 250.

Thanks,

Dennis