Keeping ac3

[scbundy]

I've got digital cable and I'm using a DCT2500 to watch it. Currently Sage is connected thru normal analog cable and cannot receive any of the digital channels. This is because then I'd be forced into watching whatever Sage currently wants to record. I've considered making my peace with that, by reducing the number of shows it records before midnight. Anyway, the trouble I'm having is with the audio. Right now my stereo reciever is connected to my DCT2500 through optical cable, so some channels I'll get DD5.1. If I run it through Sage I can't keep it. My PVR 150 has no connections for anything beyond 2 channel audio. That would be a deal killer for me. I won't lose my great audio just to be able to record the odd digital show. Does anybody know how I can record DD5.1? Is it possible with a PVR150 or would it require shopping for a new Tuner card.

I tried just keeping the audio the way it is and just connecting the video to Sage, but the 2 second delay in Sage left the audio and video WAY out of sync.

Does anybody got a good setup with Sage connecting to their digital box or has everyone done the obvious and simply bought 2 DCT boxes and have one dedicated to Sage?

[JasonJoel]

As far as I know you CAN'T do it at ALL... New hardware or not.

Someone can correct me if wrong.

Jason

[stanger89]

You might be able to do it with firewire.

[scbundy]

How do I do it with Firewire? The DCT2500 has no firewire ports. Although it does have a USB port, no idea what it's for though.

[turak]

I think you need atleast a DCT2600. I know I have AC3 support through firewire with HD recordings. I believe the DCT2600 has a built in mpeg encoder for SD content (which allows recording of SD through firewire), but I do not know if it's encoder actually encodes AC3 or not because I havn't tried to record SD through firewire yet.

[scbundy]

Ahh, too bad. There's only the 2500 here. Unless I got the HD DCT box, which is the DCT5000 or something like that. Isn't going to happen though b/c my cable company thinks I'm dumb enough to pay $400 for it.

I'm going to stick with having Sage just recording analog cable and will save Digital for live watching only. The buffered Sage recording of live TV looks terrible compared side by side to the normal live image anyway.

[turak]

My bad...I meant to say the DCT6200. I watched the Atari episode of G4's "Icon's" and I guess I had 2600 on the brain. I called it a 2600 in another post too. $400?!! That's not right. If you have a HDTV receipt, the DCT6200 is a free upgrade with my cable company. If not, you have to pay like $25 for the box. I've been slowly upgrading my old STB's so I can use firewire to do channel changes.

[scbundy]

So how does that work, does it only work for HD shows? Is the mpeg2 just copied over the firewire connection with no analoge conversion? Man that would be sweet.

[turak]

It comes over firewire as a Transport Stream. You use Graphedit to make a directx graph that converts the Transport Stream to a Program Stream which sage can decode. In another post, Narflex mentions that the next beta will have support for TS. If that's the case then there should be no need to convert TS to PS. You would just create a graph that dumps the TS to the hard drive.