So whats the plan when analog goes away?

[sfisher]

I've got two pvr500 cards recording 4 analog cable channels at a time. Am I going to need 4 STBs with 4 infrared beemers in toilet paper tubes taped in front of the Infrared receivers so that one doesn't interfere with the next?

Does anybody know whats going to happen and what kind of upgrade path we have? I can't imaging not using sage with 4 tuners - that was the Dark Ages.

[ybrew]

I've got 6 analog tuners and 2 hd homeruns.

I've got a set top box connected to 1 of the analog tuners.
For now my plan is to have 3 set top boxes and 2 hd homeruns, or in other words to downsize from 8 tuners to 5.

I'm hoping for something better by the time analog is cut off, but we'll see.

[popechild]

Keep in mind that the mandatory switch-over from analog to digital only covers OTA broadcasts. Cable and Sat providers can keep broadcasting in analog for as long as they want. Your point is still valid, but isn't necessarily connected to the "cut off" date it sounds like you're referencing...

[stevech]

we could see, in the next 5-10 years, the demise or morphing of all of the local in-town broadcasters. And thus, the fate of ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox.

Or the locals may survive by just feeding the local cable companies.
I don't think anyone knows.
I would be interested to know how many antenna users there are today.

[flavius]

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Regulation/wm1340.cfm

About 15 percent of U.S. households do not have cable or satellite subscriptions and thus rely exclusively on over-the-air signals. The National Association of Broadcasters estimates that there are some 45 million analog TV sets in these households. In addition, some 28 million more broadcast-only sets are in cable or satellite households but are not hooked up to the service.

[stevech]

So Hillary's administration will enact the bill called

"no TV left behind"

[dvd_maniac]

even when we go all digital, the analog tuners will still work, won't they?
As long as they are the pre drm version antway...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

even when we go all digital, the analog tuners will still work, won't they?
As long as they are the pre drm version antway...

They will still function, but whether they will be of any use will depend on what you mean by "all digital".

If you mean, after the analog (OTA) shutoff, and once cable companies stop using analog cable. Analog tuners will be of almost no use. Analog capture cards (ie the SVideo/Composite inputs) will still work until those outputs on cable and sat boxes are dropped.

IMO it will be a very long time until HDMI becomes the standard interconnect in the way composite and S-Video are today, and until that happens, analog capture cards will still work.

[stevech]

I would think that the FCC mandate for the broadcasters to abandon the spectrum is an issue independent of whether they still provide content to the cable companies, and perhaps satellite (e.g., WGN). Their feed to the cable companies would be video, not RF, but their channel identity legacy (News 4 or NBC 11) might remain - for marketing purposes. Many people still want their local news teams.

[korben_dallas]

I watch most of my shows in my bedroom on my SD set, and SageTV + analog capture is fine for that. But more and more content is going HD. I think the real question is how long are you going to be happy with Standard Definition.

I don't think SageTV can grow enough new users on OTA digital and QAM capture, and they certainly can't bank on analog capture forever. They're unlikely to be involved in any CableCard solution, and CableCard is still a few years away from being half-way reliable.

Maybe SageTV will come out with multi-tuner DVR STB's for cable & satellite? Something that has network streaming capabilities to the ever-elusive HD Extender?

[lobosrul]

Supposedly, starting in July cable co's are supposed to abandon any propreitary schemes/protection on their STB's. This means 3rd party companys can build and sell digital boxes. They still need a cable card to be plugged into the box however.

I dont know if maybe these boxes will send a fireware stream that can be used by Sage or not. Will be interesting to see.

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

I watch most of my shows in my bedroom on my SD set, and SageTV + analog capture is fine for that. But more and more content is going HD. I think the real question is how long are you going to be happy with Standard Definition.
.............

Standard definition (SD) will be around for a long time. Most of the digital over the air (OTA) broadcasts are in standard definition, or up converted from SD.

The Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) included SD as one of the scan rates in their standard, the digital transmission standard in the US. The ATSC system includes two modulation standards. There is 8VSB (Vestigial Side Band) for over the air and 16VSB for cable. After the cable industry delayed the acceptance of the ATSC standard so they could be included they then decided to not use 16VSB.

What is changing is that the U.S. is switching the OTA transmission from the National Television System Committee (NTSC) analog system to the Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) digital system.

In the year before the change over the government will provide discount coupons for converter boxes to homes that only receive OTA.

I would have been able, if I had a digital tuner, to receive a digital signal for almost continuously for over 10 years. The first station was a digital broadcast to Capital Hill as a demo to congress. That was followed by the model station.

The government planed a long changeover period but the cable, broadcast, retail stores and TV manufacturing industry fought the switch over. That is how we got to where we are today. The industry took the long changeover period and used the time to fight it's implementation. This shortened the 10 year overlap for the consumers to just a few years.

In fact retail stores are required to place warning labels on all analog only TV sets stating that they won't be usable after the changeover. They are being fined for not putting warning labels on the analog sets. They are also being fined for continuing to ship analog only TV sets across state lines. A great disservice to the consumer.

[hmca]

My plan is 3 Hughes E8 Sat boxes from Ebay @ $50 each feeding three 3 PVR-250's. The quality of the downconverted HD is excellent. Very little difference seen on a 47 in. Projection HD TV @ 720P.

[Jesse]

I don't think SageTV can grow enough new users on OTA digital and QAM capture, and they certainly can't bank on analog capture forever. They're unlikely to be involved in any CableCard solution, and CableCard is still a few years away from being half-way reliable.

Hi,

This rings pretty true to me. My hunch is that HD is a pretty big deal. I would guess that folks who use pc based pvr's either have HD or want it.

Along with sage we have a Directv HDDVR. This came about because it took me longer than anticipated to get a solid, reliable OTA HD signal. The wife just did not want to miss her network shows. Soon after we got it installed I got the reception issues sorted.

Right now we could probably ditch the Directv DVR and use sage exclusively as 99% of the HD shows we watch are available OTA. Soon Directv will be rolling out a lot more HD. At that point I will have to re-access whether or not it makes sense to stick with sage. If all this new HD was in mpeg2 then I could bite the bullet and go for the R5000 mod, but it will certainly be mpeg4 so R5000 is out. I guess I could go for Dish or cable and get an R5000 box. But it will be a hassle to switch providers, and my supervisor (ahem, wife) will not be easy to convince.

Opting for Directv DVR's alone wont be especially cheap either. I will need at least one more HDDVR which I doubt I can get as cheap as I got the first one. Then output will have to be distributed to at least three different rooms. I will need a third RF remote and at least one more set of Component-->cat5 extenders. Since the extenders dont do analog audio, and my upstairs tv wont take a digital audio signal (except for HDMI) that likely means a set of audio-->cat5 extenders as well. Or maybe just time to go for a cheap HT receiver for the bedroom....

What it boils down to for me, and I think the future of pc based pvrs, is either cable card has to be drastically improved and made more available, or Directv and/or Dish need to offer a pc based tuner that will support HD. I am not banking on either of these. The other, and maybe most likely, option is that someone brings an HD capable component capture card to market that can compress HD in real time and costs less than the R5000 mod.

Jesse

[wtsitmn]

I have an HD-Only PVR with 3 DTV tuners, and when they're all recording there is a monstrous amount of data being transferred. Unlike when using analog tuners, DTV files are HUMUNGOUS! My old 1500MHz computer could handle several analog tuners with ease. The CPU load was related mainly to the quality of compression I wanted.

With OTA DTV, the CPU load is somewhat minimal because the files don’t get converted to digital format. However, those huge files have other effects. In addition to the obvious increase in disc space requirements, consider the ramifications of transferring that amount of data to and from the drive(s). You need fast drives, several of them, and a motherboard that will support the high data throughput.

On my current system I cannot watch a program when three others are recording. The system just can’t pump through that much data fast enough. The video gets choppy and the recordings become corrupted. I’ve done all the things I can think of to increase throughput, but there comes a point where the hardware just can’t keep up. And I have doubts that getting a faster CPU or mobo would give all that much more throughput. Not without spending a minor fortune, that is.

If anyone out there has discovered some secrets I don’t know about, please let me know. Otherwise, let this be a word of caution to all those planning to upgrade from analog to digital.

[GKusnick]

I think you're overstating it. In my experience HD recordings, at 6-8 GB/hr, are about three times the size of good-quality SD recordings (2-3 GB/hr). SD recordings from digital sources are comparable in size to good-quality recordings from analog sources. If you're used to recording analog SD at low quality settings, then yes, you might be surprised by the jump in file size when switching to HD. But not all DTV is HD, and digital SD is really no bigger than decent-quality analog SD.

Even with HD, most hard disks sold in the last few years should have no trouble keeping up with several simultaneous streams (assuming the disks are formatted in 64K blocks as recommended). One HD stream at ~2 MB/sec represents less than 5% of typical disk bandwidth of ~50-60 MB/sec. I have an all-digital system with seven tuners and routinely record three or four programs at once without problems.

Of course those of you with multiple HDHomeRuns have an additional bottleneck to worry about. Three HD streams could easily saturate a 100 Mb network.

[wtsitmn]

I think you're overstating it. In my experience HD recordings, at 6-8 GB/hr, are about three times the size of good-quality SD recordings (2-3 GB/hr). SD recordings from digital sources are comparable in size to good-quality recordings from analog sources. If you're used to recording analog SD at low quality settings, then yes, you might be surprised by the jump in file size when switching to HD. But not all DTV is HD, and digital SD is really no bigger than decent-quality analog SD.

Even with HD, most hard disks sold in the last few years should have no trouble keeping up with several simultaneous streams (assuming the disks are formatted in 64K blocks as recommended). One HD stream at ~2 MB/sec represents less than 5% of typical disk bandwidth of ~50-60 MB/sec. I have an all-digital system with seven tuners and routinely record three or four programs at once without problems.

Of course those of you with multiple HDHomeRuns have an additional bottleneck to worry about. Three HD streams could easily saturate a 100 Mb network.

Thank you so much for your comments. However, you really weren't of much help, at least not to me. Your claim that your system allegedly performs better than mine is useful only if we're having a pi$$ing contest, and I'm not interested in doing that. If you know any truly useful tips which would help me and others improve performance, please feel free to share them.

Your posting seemed to imply that an analog user will encounter no significant issues when upgrading to DTV. I can say from experience that isn’t the case, at least it wasn’t for me. That’s what I was trying to convey in my previous post. Many people use older computers which they converted into PVR’s. My point was that those people, and others, will encounter significant issues when they try to upgrade to DTV. They can’t just trade in their analog tuners for digital ones and expect everything to be hunky-dory. Even building a new one from scratch, as I did, may not quite perform as hoped. Of course if you build a state-of-the-art computer using the latest components and an unlimited budget, your results may differ.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by wtsitmn

Thank you so much for your comments. However, you really weren't of much help, at least not to me. Your claim that your system allegedly performs better than mine is useful only if we're having a pi$$ing contest, and I'm not interested in doing that. If you know any truly useful tips which would help me and others improve performance, please feel free to share them.

Your posting seemed to imply that an analog user will encounter no significant issues when upgrading to DTV. I can say from experience that isn’t the case, at least it wasn’t for me. That’s what I was trying to convey in my previous post. Many people use older computers which they converted into PVR’s. My point was that those people, and others, will encounter significant issues when they try to upgrade to DTV. They can’t just trade in their analog tuners for digital ones and expect everything to be hunky-dory. Even building a new one from scratch, as I did, may not quite perform as hoped. Of course if you build a state-of-the-art computer using the latest components and an unlimited budget, your results may differ.

But you are also equating DTV to HDTV. DTV is both SD snd HD. If today a person has no interest in recording HD and tomorrow starts receiving a digital signal only though their cable box it will have virtually no impact on them in comparison to their SD analog recording. A digital or analog SD recording is also trying to convey. And they could actually use the svideo out of their digital cable box to the svideo in of their analog tuner and continue recording their shows in SD.

The way I read his comments about HD is that a system with relatively new drives and hardware has more then enough bandwidth and throughput to handle HD. But getting that perfect, stutter-free HD picture will encompass more than that. (Appropriate video card, drivers and decoders seems to play a huge part in this) But like he said from a network encoder aspect (like hdhomerun) 3 or 4 simultaneous streams on a 100 MB network could be an issue. I have my network wired as gigabit but currently have only 1 hdhomerun. (But 2 DualTV ananlog tuner cards).

Gerry

[toricred]

But you were talking about HD. The requirement is for Digital not HD. Digital is not significantly more difficult to deal with than SD. The only key is that you need a digital source such as satellite.

Edit: Guess I was a little slow on the reply.

[Ken C]

If we talk only about cable, I wonder what the customer base looks like ? What percentage of customers have a STB ? Currently, I have none. When cable goes completely digital I will need four STB's just for the TV's in the house, excluding SageTV. There might be some screaming from us Luddites !!

My Sage system currently has four analog tuners (150's) and one HD (MyHD). When cable goes completely digital the MyHD should still work with the unencrypted QAM channels and four additional STB's will be needed (and the associated headaches) if I wanted to use all four 150's. Probably not the best solution!!

Also, all the recordings are stored in a server and the tuners are in the Sage box. Probably would have to move the tuners to the server, doubt the LAN could handle 3 or 4 simultaneous HD streams. Of course, if I'm still using the 150's as capture cards they won't be HD streams. This is all very confusing.

Ah yes, the times they are a changing ...