Want Satelitte HDTV played with SageTV

[StylinLP]

Can HD-AUX FOR HOLO3DGRAPH-II play HDTV from Satelitte?
I need to find a way to connect HDTV channel using Direct TV satelitte to a HTPC then on to a DVI Plasma screen Pioneer 51" or a ElectraHome 8500 CRT projector. I would like to watch HDTV football on the plasma! )

I've been sold on using SageTV and the Haupauge WinTV-PVR-350 card but the Haupauge WinTV-HD card says specificaly this:

"The WinTV-HD can receive hi-def programs from either cable TV or a TV antenna.

Note: The WinTV-HD cannot receive encrypted digital cable TV or satellite TV. It is designed to receive ATSC digital TV standard programs, plus standard analog TV"

I would like to use the software SageTV to control my channel watching. My overlay program to control it all will be Main Lobby 2.

So which solution is the best to do all this?
FusionHDTVII
HOLO3DGRAPH-II
Haupauge WinTV-PVR-350

The SageTV website mentions only a few input cards like Haupauge.

Any help is greatly appreciated! please

[Mark Lamutt]

As far as I know, there are no PC card solutionst that can capture HD signals via component, RGB or DVI from a satellite receiver. The one exception was the Dish 5000 receiver because the HD module converted the HD signal into an 8VSB signal that could be captured. But, that's not an option anymore.

[Sailn]

StylinLP, sage does not yet work with any hdtv cards. There has been talk (posts) on this and I too hope this will happen. To answer your question, I would reccomend going to the avsforum.com, there has been considerable discussion in the past on it. Here is the problem, the folks who sell you HDTV cable or HDTV sat programing DO NOT WANT YOU TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS! They are quite concerned, and justifiably so, that you will record this material and be able to "share" hdtv programing which at present is hard to find in any consumer media (dvhs excluded). As I understand it, there is/was a way to mod the 5000 sat receiver to have a firewire output which you could then record. I forget the company name, but a little searching and you should be able to find it. This is a short term solution as this receiver is being phased out and the new one will be more challenging to mod. If you are lucky enough to have a sat receiver with an rf modulator on it that will output an atsc signal, then a hdtv tuner card will work for you. These boxes have been out of production for quite some time. Once in a while they are on e-bay for obscene amounts of money.

The holo3d card is only for sd video and does not support hdtv. It is imho the best card at doing what it does which is accepting 480i/576i video from a tv tuner, dvd player, sat box, etc. It will then deinterlace the video. The scalling is really done in the graphics card. Plain and simple at about $900 it is cheap compared to the alternitive high end scalers you might find.

The dvico card (fusion) is only for off the air hdtv and will not work with a sat recvr or hd cable. The FusionIII will/should be cable compatable. Assuming that the cable is not encrypted, it will allow for recording hd cable.

The 350 is sd only.

Of the three cards you listed, the only one which is supported afaik if the haupauge card. The output on the 350 is not dvi and you will have to use a graphics card with dvi output it you want it. Thus you might want to save some money and get the 250.

In any case, none of the cards mentioned will do what you want.

[RGyorfi]

The H3D-II can input a HDTV signal (via its daughter card) and then scale it accordingly. But it's not capable of recording from everything I've read about it.

[Sailn]

RGyorfi, True, the aux card can accept hd input, but after the signal is processed, it is output via the aux card and is not available to the pci bus. I am not sure why immersive went this way. Perhaps it was to avoid the mpaa comming down on them. They are a small company and most likely could afford the legal fees.

[JJarmoc]

Sailn - I think it's more likely that a full uncompressed HDTV signal would saturate the PCI bus.

[Sailn]

atsc over a 6MHz cable channel is 38Mbps and ota is 19Mbps. Crummy pci 33MHz 32bit is 133MB/s although pci usually peaks at 100-110 MB/s

[edmc]

ATSC being 38Mb/s or 19Mb/s is definately a far cry from saturating the 100+ MB/s PCI bus.

Note the case of the 'b' and the 'B'... I would imagine the "crummy pci 33/32 bus" could carry 20+ ATSC streams without stressing...

What JJarmoc is referring to is not the ATSC stream, which is a highly compressed MPEG-2 signal. Rather, he's talking about the data rate AFTER decompression. Here's where the numbers get serious (note that I left out the overscan bits which are there in the signal going to the monitor but need not cross the PCI bus):

720p/60Hz
--------------
720 lines
1280 columns
8 bits per color
3 colors
60 frames per second
---------------------------
1,327,104,000 bits/second (~1.2Gb/s)
or
165,888,000 Bytes/second (~158MB/s)

1080i/60Hz
--------------
1080 lines (interlaced)
1920 columns
8 bits per color
3 colors
30 full frames per second (1 frame == 2 interlaced fields)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1,492,992,000 bits/second (~1.4Gb/s)
or
186,624,000 (~178MB/s)

[JJarmoc]

Edmc gets my point and explained it much better than I'd have been able to do.

ATSC isn't the problem, that's a digital mpeg encoded stream The problem is that when you talk about the composite connections, you're talking about a decoded analog stream that is MUCH larger.

In order to capture a composite source, there'd need to be a device that could read in the analog composite signal, re-encode it to MPEG, or some other compressed digital format and make that available on the PCI bus or write it to disk. I'm no expert, but I'm sure that'd be pretty mathematically intensive and thus either require an extremely powerful CPU and/or a complicated dedicated processor. Something like this probably exists, but if it does to my knowledge it's so far not been seen outside the broadcast industry. I'd also bet it'd be a purpose built hardware device, capable only of encoding. I'm sure it's a matter of time before general purpose PC technology catches up and makes that feasible. In fact, PCI-X is a big step in that direction, but probably won't be widespread outside the server arena for quite some time. Even then, I'm not sure we'd be able to capture multiple streams, or record and playback at the same time as we'd need to do for a functional HTPC.

At any rate, I'm making a few assumptions here, and talking about stuff I really know very little about, but edmc has graciously provided the numbers to at least give my line of thinking some credence.