Hate to say it, but DirectTV makes me use Sage much less...

[raoul]

It's the monthly fees that prevent me from going this route. I am unsure of the amounts, but I think DTV wants like $15/month for the HD, plus another $5/month for the DVR, plus another $5/month for the additional receivers. I am sick to death of these additional monthly fees. I really do not mind paying for the equipment and would gladly buy an expensive HD DVR, but not in addition to these fees.

Yes... I have 700-800 into my PC setup at least and realize that SageTV is not a cost effective solution. However, I am willing to buy the equipment if it just keeps me away from those monthly fees. DTV is overpriced as it is and gets annoying with their continual fee hikes every year.

[kevine]

I agree. I hate those monthly fees. That is why I went the Sage/cable route but if there was a way to get D* HD into Sage server for a reasonable per tuner price, I would switch back in a second. If a pci D* tuner were available for less then say <$200, I myself would move back to D*.

Dish is nice with the R5000 but at what expense? I currently record 5 HD channels at 1 time 4 by HDHR and 1 by HVR-1600 for the price of 1 R5000. Yeah, I know I cannot record the premiums over QAM or the XX number extra HD channels but we don't watch them. I watch the 6 major networks mostly and in HD when available.

D*/satellite has other advantages too. I used to live in FL and during the last hurricane the storm knocked out cable for 1 month! And this was a minor storm. Converted to D* because I wasn't going through that again. I can take my dish down before the storm, put it back up after it's gone with no TV loss other then during the storm. I live in NJ now and the chances of loosing my cable here like that are slim. BTW, the waiting list to get D* after the storm was the same time it took to get cable back. Go figure.

[domc]

I have Dish right now and I am grandfathered in with the fees. I pay no extra for boxes. Everytime I think I will upgrade to HD I say no for two reasons:

Current Cost: I'll wait till next year when all digital channels are available and what packages are around.

Commercials: We are spoiled with Showanalyzer software. I haven't seen a commercial in two years. If we use any of the commercial boxes, I have to resort to the dam 30 second skip button which I did use when I was using the Dish PVR. So much that the FF button on the remote whore off. Commercial boxes are not allowed to put the automatic commercial skip in there software. I can't stand to watch commercials now.

I will stick with SageTV even if it means down converted the HD signals to watch on my CRT tv. I'm not to impressed with the compression that all the Cable/Sat services are putting on the HD content anyway.

[malbec]

I got an HD extender for Christmas. I am now addicted to HD and would like more content than the five or so shannels I can get with my HDHR. I have seven TVs in the house so the cost/benefit of paying the cable/dish guys extra for a multiroom setup versus an R5000, maybe even two, is compelling.

As someone who is just cutting their teeth on getting content from something more complicated than a HDHR or PVR-150 card, can someone tell me the story on Direct TV and a R5000 modified box? I see the R5000 only mentioned here with dish network?

Also, if you would be so kind, can someone clue me in as to why a Direct TV receiver would "have a better picture than a HDHR if the picture is broadcast digitally? (Assuming you have a decent video card for playback).

[kevine]

You can get the R5000 for D*. The are here: http://www.nextcomwireless.com/r5000/products.htm

[rajczi]

I had many of the same questions that are being asked about the R5000 and I sent them an email a while back... Here is what they had to say:

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My Question:

I currently am implementing a SageTV server and have DirecTV and Time Warner (analog and qam) cable. To be honest, I don’t really care what provider is giving me the service, so I wanted to know which box of yours will give me the best results (most channels, most HD channels, most reliable performance, etc). I am not averse to moving everything to Dish, expanding my DirecTV service or adding digital cable HD, more focused on getting the most productive/reliable service for SageTV.

Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated,

Chris

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The Answer:

Chris,

All of the modifications work equally well and provide the same features. However, we cannot modify any of the new DirecTV MPEG-4 receivers so that solution is not very future-proof. Any cable service that uses Motorola STBs can be used, but we cannot modify any box that has a Firewire port. The modification is a direct digital capture so it doesn't work with analog cable at all. You can capture all digital channels, SD and HD. For Dish network we modify all the current receiver equipment so you will be able to capture all the new MPEG-4 HD offerings. Thanks,

David

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I am not 100% sure, but I think most if not all of the new HD channels on DirecTV are MPEG-4 channels so I would think that the R5000 can't handle that yet (if ever). Certainly not the news I was looking for...

Hope this helps,

Chris

[sandor]

just a quick note in regards to PQ - this has nothing to do with the tuner - when it comes to digital transmission, the HDHR or AverMedia or blah blah blah tuner within the STB simply receives the signal, and writes it to disk - this is the beauty of digital transmission, if you get the signal, you get it in all its glory.


any PQ difference can only be chalked up to the video display system (decoders, et al) or the initial PQ coming from the source (satellite, OTA, cable). What i receive OTA from my local stations is the same digital feed that they give comcast and the dishes, so very technically (and fairly apparent on screen as well) my 25 year old antenna on the roof can give me a better, less compressed PQ than either comcast or the dishes. my HDHR's and a180s simply write the bits and bytes of that MPEG2 stream to a hard drive, and have no effect on the PQ.

[kevine]

Originally Posted by rajczi

I am not 100% sure, but I think most if not all of the new HD channels on DirecTV are MPEG-4 channels so I would think that the R5000 can't handle that yet (if ever).
Chris

Yes, this is correct. MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 enabled D* to add all of these channels otherwise they would not have had enough bandwidth. This plus, I believe the new programming is off another moon as well.