Digital Cable setup?

[ottoreck]

i currently have Sage setup with two tuners with Analog Cable. I have a friend that wants me to help him setup a sage for him, but he has Digital Cable and I can't visualized how it will work.

How does it usually work with digital cable? Do i need to get a special remote or can it work fine with two Haupuage 250 cards and the standard romote that comes with the boards? I thought that the cable box did all the channel switching?

What's the basic setup for a digital comcast setup?

Sorry for the newbie question...

[bluenote]

I'm waiting on my USB-UIRT to be delivered for channel changing, and Im only 3/4 through setting mine up but I have confirmed things as far as I have gone.

I have one 350, utilizing the tv-out. Coax cable supplies my basic channels (and lets me take advantage of the tuner on the 350), and then in my case I run the output from my cable box back to the 350 IN (s-vid port and 1/8" stereo). In sage I end up with TWO listed sources, but I havent actually configured past that since my UIRT isnt here and I dont want new guide data interfering yet.

Hope that helps. I struggled with it a bit myself.

Cory

[m1abrams]

You need something like a USB-UIRT to act as an IR blaster to control the cable boxes.

You connect the cable boxes to your tuners via svideo or composite and tell sagetv to use whatever ir blaster you have connected to control the cable box. You actually want to make sure that ONLY the IR blaster can send signals to the cable box so that it does not accidentally get changed, I do this by building a fort around the cable box ir reciever and the ir blaster. Then you need to tell sagetv what ir codes are used to control the cable box.

Once that is setup, any time you tell sage to change channels or when sage needs to change channel to record a show it sends the approiate ir signal to the cable box to change channels. This makes channel surfing near impossible though because the time to change channels is on the order of 2-3 seconds. Course using SageTV or any decent PVR, channel surfing and watching livetv should be a thing of the past and the channel change delay becomes a moot point.