Is this accurate information about capturing from digital cable ?

[jimosity]

OK - I've gone thru two HD-PVRs now and they are so flaky that I can't get consistent results and I'm at my wits end with the junk drivers and random lockups. I thought I possibly had gotten a bad HD-PVR since it seems that a lot of people end up RMAing theirs and getting another with better results.
I have tried included drivers, beta drivers, four different PCs and consistently get the same level of flakiness and unreliability out of this thing.

I decided to take my HD-PVR back to get something else and while I was there - the guy at the store told me that they sold zero other devices that would be able to capture digital video; only the HD-PVR. I ended up getting a second HD-PVR thinking that possibly my original unit was just junk - I get the second one home and it has almost exactly the same problems.

All I want is this:
I have Time Warner Digital Cable - I do not care about being able to record HD - just digital. I need to be able to have a unit that will change the channels on my STB since I want to record movie channels.
Is the guy right that the HD-PVR is the ONLY unit that can record digital cable? Like I told the guy - I don't care if it's recording HD, I just want to record digital. They have all of the other Hauppauge devices and I just think that the USB stuff is a total flake and I want...no I *NEED* something reliable.
If the HD-PVR is my only option - I'm guessing all that's left for me to do is scrap the entire HTPC and go to Time Warner HD-DVR and be done with all this hassle.
HELP!!

[Graygeek]

Check out Post #6 here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42319

Also search here for HAVA

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by Graygeek

Check out Post #6 here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42319

Also search here for HAVA

I've been reading your posts about the HAVA and may have to give it a shot.
Some of your original posts about the HAVA say that you had some issues with channel changing; I assume that with some plugin that those issues are resolved? Most of my channels I want to record are in the 200-230 range - I remember reading about some issues with channels above 150.

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by Graygeek

Check out Post #6 here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42319

Also search here for HAVA

Also - is MCE *REQUIRED* for Hava or will any WinXP machine running Sage work?

[stanger89]

Wild curiosity what chipset/USB controller are you using? Any USB hub?

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Wild curiosity what chipset/USB controller are you using? Any USB hub?

I'm using Dell GX280's.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by jimosity

All I want is this:
I have Time Warner Digital Cable - I do not care about being able to record HD - just digital. I need to be able to have a unit that will change the channels on my STB since I want to record movie channels.
Is the guy right that the HD-PVR is the ONLY unit that can record digital cable? Like I told the guy - I don't care if it's recording HD, I just want to record digital. They have all of the other Hauppauge devices and I just think that the USB stuff is a total flake and I want...no I *NEED* something reliable.
If the HD-PVR is my only option - I'm guessing all that's left for me to do is scrap the entire HTPC and go to Time Warner HD-DVR and be done with all this hassle.
HELP!!

If you plan to keep your set top box and you don't care about HD, you can use almost any capture device. It doesn't matter whether you have digital or analog cable or satellite. The set top box from your cable or satellite provider takes care of tuning the channel and decoding any encryption and then puts out a signal your TV (or capture device) can accept.

Most set top boxes have several outputs. You usually pick the best one that will work with your TV and leave the other ones alone. Not all of the outputs will support HD. Even most of the HD set top boxes have some connectors that are SD only.

Here are some of the most common connectors:
SD Only: RF (Coax), Composite (single RCA connector for video, plus separate connectors for audio), S-Video (round connector with multiple pins).
SD and HD: Component (3 RCA connectors for video, plus separate connectors for audio), HDMI, DVI, Firewire

So, you can use pretty much any of the Hauppauge capture cards along with an IR-blaster to change channels on your Set top box. Personally, I use a couple of Hauppauge PVR-150 capture cards with a USBUIRT to change the channels on the boxes. I use the USBUIRT because the Hauppauge drivers only allow you to use one blaster even if you have multiple capture cards.

There are many other cards and USB devices that will also work. Just make sure you get one that does hardware MPEG encoding (there are many devices that use software encoders and these make your CPU do all the work).

Now, if you want to record digital cable without a set top box, there are several digital tuner cards. The device with the most favorable reviews is the Silicon Dust HdHomerun. It is an external device that connects to your PC via Ethernet. I have one of these. It has two tuners for digitial cable or digital over the air (antenna) only. It will not work with a set top box and it cannot capture analog cable or analog antenna signals (analog antenna goes away in the USA this week anyway). It also cannot tune encrypted channels. Since it has built in digital tuners, it doesn't use an IR blaster. But again, it can only tune channels that are not encrypted, so your results will vary depending on who your cable provider is.

For full HD of all the channels your set top box can receive, the HD-PVR is the only option I know of, but I have not tried it myself, and from what I have seen on these forums, it appears that a lot of people have had a lot of problems with them...

[sic0048]

Tiki beat me to it.

You can use the S-video output (or composite output if there is no S-video output) from your digital STB to an analog tuner card that has a S-video (or composite) input. Many of the Hauppauge cards have this and I'm sure other manufactures do.

The recordings will be 480i and not hD, but they will be much better quality than analog cable or analog OTA signals because you are getting the benefit of recording a digital signal. In the end, you recordings should look as good as standard DVDs. Obviously not HD, but you won't have to mess with the HD-PVR.

The HD-PVR, or R5000 modified STB are about the only ways to record High Definition encrypted digital cable or satellite as you already have been told.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by jimosity

I'm using Dell GX280's.

Are you using the GX280 for playback? What vid card are you running?

Further, what do you mean by flakiness and unreliable? Those are pretty broad statements?

Mine is rock solid, but playback is thru HD100/HD200's.

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Are you using the GX280 for playback? What vid card are you running?

Further, what do you mean by flakiness and unreliable? Those are pretty broad statements?

Mine is rock solid, but playback is thru HD100/HD200's.

Yes, the GX280 is used for playback.

My setup is this:
Time Warner Digital cable to a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 4240HDC STB.
Component Out to the HD-PVR -> USB to GX280.
GX280 has 1 gig of ram and a 512 MB ATI Radeon 4550 video card.
GX280 sound card is sent to my surround sound unit.
I'm using VGA out of the video card to a Dell 3200MP projector.

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Further, what do you mean by flakiness and unreliable? Those are pretty broad statements?

You can read more about my flaky, unreliable issues with the HD-PVR here;
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42319

[Clift]

Originally Posted by jimosity

Yes, the GX280 is used for playback.

My setup is this:
Time Warner Digital cable to a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 4240HDC STB.
Component Out to the HD-PVR -> USB to GX280.
GX280 has 1 gig of ram and a 512 MB ATI Radeon 4550 video card.
GX280 sound card is sent to my surround sound unit.
I'm using VGA out of the video card to a Dell 3200MP projector.

By chance do you have the output of the SA 4240HDC locked to 720p or 1080i?
Are you using the RCA stereo inputs or the optical S/PDIF?

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by Clift

By chance do you have the output of the SA 4240HDC locked to 720p or 1080i?
Are you using the RCA stereo inputs or the optical S/PDIF?

I have it locked at 720p
I am using the RCA stereo inputs.

[Clift]

I'm almost out of ideas... What rev is your HD PVR?

What remote do you use with your HTPC?

[jimosity]

Originally Posted by Clift

I'm almost out of ideas... What rev is your HD PVR?

What remote do you use with your HTPC?

Not sure on the rev, I'll have to check when I get home.
I used to use a Firefly remote with my system when I had BeyondTV, but now that I've switched to Sage, I have *NEVER* been able to the get the included remote to work with either of the HD-PVRs I've tried.
I choose "45 button Hauppauge remote" -- but the included remote only has 43 buttons and never has worked, I've never gotten the unit to work well enough to battle the non-working remote issue, so I figured why bother with that since the unit doesn't work very well for me to begin with.

My whole journey here was never to be able to have some massive HTPC; but simply because our Time Warner DVRs would fill up with all of the shows we liked to watch (plus kids shows, which take a silly amount of space)...and I don't know of any way to get those videos off the units without doing some real time playback and capture. If I could simply get the digital videos off my DVRs and convert them to some sort of format and avoid the real time playback, my dreams would be answered.

[Clift]

Please see this FAQ for your remote woes:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...2108#post32108

[jimosity]

I'll test the HD-PVR one last time tonight before I give up and move on to either a normal old DVR or something else.

I'm not a rocket scientist or anything, but this is the remote that I have.
and it's the remote that I have configured in the SageTV installation, haven't checked the faq info you gave in the last post, but please someone answer this...
I have counted the buttons on that device more than twice and I always come up with 43 buttons, not 45....so what memo did I miss on that one?

EDIT; wait....are they counting the volume up and down and channel up and down as four buttons? I guess that may make sense if I think hard enough.

[Graygeek]

Originally Posted by jimosity

I've been reading your posts about the HAVA and may have to give it a shot.
Some of your original posts about the HAVA say that you had some issues with channel changing; I assume that with some plugin that those issues are resolved? Most of my channels I want to record are in the 200-230 range - I remember reading about some issues with channels above 150.

If you check out the plugin by Jason in the download section

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=299

The all you need is the HAVA with the Firmware level he describes and the channel changer works 100%. No need for MCE and anything special, except the FW level. I'm very pleased with the reliability of my HAVA and using component capture the quality is not bad .... as good as any DVD. I'm just amazed more people don't look at this as an alternative to the HDPVR. Granted it's not full HD but it's a good reliable alternative.

[Clift]

Here's something that has come up recently:

I was capturing using the RCA stereo inputs but the format was AC3...
MPEG2-TS[H.264 1080i, AC3/384Kbps@48kHz Stereo]
I was getting some intermittent lockups that were not repeatable to a particular channel or time... But the lockups were rare so I didn't pay too much attention.

Recently I have found that changing to AAC audio made my HD PVR a lot more stable...
MPEG2-TS[H.264 1080i, AAC@48kHz Stereo]
YMMV of course...

I used Total Media Extreme to change the encoding format.

[jimosity]

Just an update for those that have been helping me with my HD-PVR problems and listening to my crybabying about it's flakiness....

Last night, I reinstalled WinXP Pro SP3 on a GX280 - made sure all drivers were installed as needed for general system devices; then installed my ATI 4550; made sure the full drivers and applications were installed...
Then I had a PCI/Firewire card laying around that I had bought for something else and never used; so I put it in and made sure the drivers installed ---
then installed the HD-PVR (on the new USB card) with the beta drivers - then all of the HD-PVR applications.
I configured the irblaster for the correct settings (in my case Cable Box/Scientific Atlanta/code 042 --- posting for my own ability to check back later in case I need to) --- I then installed Sage; leaving out the server settings and placeshifting options -- after configured, I then closed Sage; overwrote the ir*.ini file that was in the Windows directory with the updated one for the 45 button remote that I found in the link provided earlier (thanks) in this thread.

I started up Sage, configured a few settings (recording location, etc.) - waited for the Program Guide to be completed -- then tested watching a few channels - all seemed to start working much better.
I then scheduled about a half dozen 30 minute shows and a couple movies on random channels to start recording -- most of which were starting and ending sequentially - just to try to put it thru it's paces... I then left the box and went to bed.

This morning I went to check on it -- it was still recording a show that was on AND it had recorded ALL of the other shows I had requested!!!
The only thing that I had done different was to install a USB card and connect the HD-PVR to it instead of the onboard USB -- so that *seems* to have solved my issues and may be the trick that will keep me as a Sage/HDPVR user.

I've got it recording a bunch of shows all day today to test when I get home and then "True Blood" starts up this Sunday -- so then I'll really start depending on it. Glad I bought all those (4) Terabyte drives!

One final question - I know that in one of the previous attempts of Sage configuration, I pointed it at one of my drives that I store movies on (that are encoded with the xvid codec) - it didn't want to play those movies correctly -- then I installed K-Lite Codec pack and then Sage could play all of them without any issues.
Now that I have the unit working (I think) -- when I attach that drive to serve up my media; would installing that K-Lite Codec pack again be ok without screwing anything up or should I just install the xvid codec only?

Another thing - I love the compression of xvid, but the conversion process is sort of time consuming and painful -- is there another compression method that I can run (automatically?) on my recordings to keep them to a reasonable size? Keep in mind that I'm happy with the quality of xvid compressed shows; so it's not like I need some crazy large HD quality to be maintained.
What compression methods are best? I have never looked at any of the plugins or add ons for Sage yet as this is the first time I've really got things working well.