newbie question - why do you need a tuner, for satellite feed?

[elsifer]

We are thinking of building a linux-based SageTV box to record from dish network. We live in a valley, and don't get much in the way of HD over the air, but would eventually like for this box to record HD from the dish. The stupid, and perhaps obvious question is - why do we need a TV tuner?

[sainswor99]

You don't, except that I don't know of any video capture cards that work with Sage that don't come with tuners.

Someone else may be able to suggest something, but AFAIK, you need a tuner card to capture video.

[GKusnick]

You said you want to record HD eventually. What do you plan to do in the meantime? If you want to record SD from the S-Video output of your STB, then Stu is right: you don't need a tuner, but you're unlikely to find an SD capture card without one.

On the other hand if "eventually" is now and you want to record the true HD signal, not the downconverted SD output, then you don't need a capture card at all. What you need is an R5000-HD mod for your Dish STB.