New HDTV recording possibility!

[sleonard]

This AVS Forum thread discusses a newly available modification for satelite boxes that allows HDTV to be recorded to an XP system. If only it had Sage support (hint,hint) it would be worth looking into.

[stanger89]

First that's not really new news (4 months old). Plus it's $1000 plus the cost of the box.

[edmc]

I believe what is new is it's actually been released :-)

Seriously, as it currently stands, isn't this RD5000-HD solution only for Satellite (and OTA supported in those Sat boxes)?

My understanding is that the Sat folks are re-encoding many of the HD stations to cram more on the satellites causing many to complain about the resultant quality.

Fortunately, the Cable crowd hasn't yet succumbed to this practice as far as I know. Unfortunately, the RD5000-HD doesn't appear to apply to Cable boxes (probably because we all rent those unlike the Sat boxes which are individually owned).

Very interesting, though... Seems to be a more-likely-to-succeed approach than the FireBus FireWire approach unfortunately...

[mls]

If you notices it requires having to "modify" the Sat receivers which of course not only voids any warranty, but may also become illegal and/or impossible to do shortly.

[stanger89]

I'm still waiting for a hardware HD encoder so we can just hook the component outputs of HD boxen to our PCs and record like we do now with SD sat. I think that would make nearly everybody happy. The copies wouldn't be perfect quality so the studios would be happy (-er) but the quality would still be very good so we'd be happy.