USB TV Tuner / Capture card

[Pete]

Its just a satellite tuner card that fits inside of a computer. That said the one I utilize is very old.

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/dvb_s.htm

I kept my old HT going with a 3 meter dish in the old house until I moved. Always liked the technology and was into ham radio in the 1960's. Thinking I purchased a DTV system when it was first introduced way long time ago. Thinking it was a Sony cuz I remember controlling the receiver via its RS-232 port at the time. It was more of a technology play thing purchase.

[lj502]

Rupp,
What are you using the card for? Seems the only thing not asked.

John

[Rupp]

Rupp,
What are you using the card for? Seems the only thing not asked.

John

I used to run SageTV on that same server but since SageTV is now defunct I just grab the torrents for my TV shows. I never did get a new tuner card as it's too easy just to grab the torrents and stream them from my laptops to my TV's.

[NeverDie]

madcodger asked about low power options. According to Roku, typical power consumption is 3.5W when streaming HD video on the Roku3. Not sure what the power consumption is at idle, but there is literally no way to "OFF" it short of unplugging it. i.e. it's intended to be always-on. Would like to know what the ranges are for XMBC's. In comparison, a PS3 burns 177 watts while idling! That's a lot of heat dissipate, especially if your media gear is inside cabinetry. I would not recommend a PS3.

www.instantwatcher.com will search across channels for video content. Would be interested to know if there's anything better.

[NeverDie]

For those of you who are capturing OTA HDTV, are you just writing the compressed datastream (MPEG-2 in north America) to disk, or are you transcoding to h.264 first for greater storage efficiency?

If the later case,
1. Do you notice any drop in visual fidelity for the transcoded video versus the source (non-transcoded video) when played back?
2. What are you using to accomplish the transcoding to H.265? Handbrake? What about using hardware assisted transcoding (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-HD...d_sim_sbs_pc_2), and if so, how are you liking the quality of the transcode?

[NeverDie]

Just noticed that the SiliconDust transcoding receivers haven't yet been released, although a couple of them will be pretty soon. I tried a couple different hardware assisted transcoders in 2006-2007, but back then they weren't real-time (they were only about 2x faster than a dual core processor) and their transcoding was poor quality. i.e. they were worthless. Fast forward to recent times, and I see that quality on hardware transcoding is still an issue (http://techreport.com/review/23324/a...ng-on-the-pc/6). I guess for now I'll just plan on extra HDD space. In the worst case, I could always transcode after-the-fact in non-realtime anything I might want to archive.... Just let whatever server CPU slowly grind away on the transcode until done. At least that way the transcode quality won't be sacrificed. On the other hand, if SiliconDust's new hardware transcoding worked great, it would avoid the hassle. I guess I'll wait a bit longer and see if maybe they finally nailed it. Their other HW transcoding soon-to-ship device is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815345016

[Uncle Michael]

For those of you who are capturing OTA HDTV, are you just writing the compressed datastream (MPEG-2 in north America) to disk, or are you transcoding to h.264 first for greater storage efficiency?

If the later case,
1. Do you notice any drop in visual fidelity for the transcoded video versus the source (non-transcoded video) when played back?
2. What are you using to accomplish the transcoding to H.265?

I save directly from WMC, then if I don't delete it in a few days I have MCEBuddy running in the background to convert to h.264. That has been working well for over a year, and the video quality is excellent, but it is slow, even on a quad core i5. My biggest complaint is that sometimes the audio is slightly out of sync on the compressed file.

[NeverDie]

I save directly from WMC, then if I don't delete it in a few days I have MCEBuddy running in the background to convert to h.264. That has been working well for over a year, and the video quality is excellent, but it is slow, even on a quad core i5. My biggest complaint is that sometimes the audio is slightly out of sync on the compressed file.

Thanks! The out-of-sync would drive me nuts though. I don't immediately recall what software I finally wound up using for transcoding way back when, but I do remember trying out a bunch of them before I finally found a good one. If you're interested, I'll look up what it was. I think it might have come from a Russian software company that did really outstanding work in the area. So, there's at least one out there (and probably many) that do manage to avoid the sound-sync problem.

Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) didn't exist when I last surveyed, but I see it referenced a lot now, and it's free. Might be worth a try.

[Uncle Michael]

Fortunately the audio sync problem is only sporadic and doesn't bother me much. I haven't checked the latest version of the software, but they are upgrading it regularly, so it may be less of an issue.

I do the conversion primarily to save disk space. I like the fact that it will monitor my files and automatically convert them after they are more than x days old. Most of what I record is from PBS, so I don't bother with commercial removal, but that is also an interesting feature that can reduce disk space - and annoyance - significantly.

[TeleFragger]

bringing back a not too old thread... so can the ones with homerun prime chime in here?

i see someone is using 1 for cable and 1 for ota...

so i get 2 tuners... i thought you had to hookup the homerun to your cable box....

so if you are watching 1 channel.. it can put that onto your network... so how does the 2nd tuner get worked?

or is it that you get it with the cable card then that essentially you dont need the cable box and the homerun can then do 2 boxes?

i have comcast/xfinity and was going to get a slingbox but reading that they are falling to the side as they are relying on their monopoly where others are coming up and getting better...

my basement is neering completion and I want to get something setup for when I am away from home and want to watch nfl or nhl while im out.... live of course....

[Pete]

i see someone is using 1 for cable and 1 for ota...

I have both.

so if you are watching 1 channel.. it can put that onto your network... so how does the 2nd tuner get worked?

You can put all of the tuners on your network.

If one tuner is being utilized for recording you cannot change the channel on it; but you can watch another channel on another tuner if you want. MythTV also concurrently records the channels you are watching such that you can pause and resume TV in virtual vivo.

There is a whole bunch of stuff over here:

http://www.silicondust.com/

[skybolt]

... so i get 2 tuners... i thought you had to hookup the homerun to your cable box.

so if you are watching 1 channel.. it can put that onto your network... so how does the 2nd tuner get worked?

or is it that you get it with the cable card then that essentially you dont need the cable box and the homerun can then do 2 boxes?

Not sure if you meant what you typed, neither of the devices get connected to the cable box.

The HDHR's come in a few flavors:

The HDHR Dual lets you get clear QAM and OTA digital signals and outputs them via IP.

The HDHR Prime is a cable card unit with three tuners which also outputs via
IP.

Both of these units need some sort of PC to retrieve and decode the signal.
So here is where it gets complicated. With the Cable Card, the channels are digitally marked, CopyFreely and CopyOnce and CopyNever (PPV etc).

CopyFreely channels will work with XBMC and other non DRM based software.

CopyOnce needs to be viewed by software that supports DRM and can olny be played by the what recorded it and it's clients. Right now the only the thing that does that is WMC 7 (7MC), either way it's part of Windows 7.

From what I have heard Comcast is mostly CopyOnce, you'll have to check but over at the Sage forums everyone is pretty much locked up at this point.

I have two HDHR Primes and use 7MC, converted from Sage two years ago, and I don't mind it a bit, in fact I actually like 7MC better the Sage because of the HD support.

i have comcast/xfinity and was going to get a slingbox but reading that they are falling to the side as they are relying on their monopoly where others are coming up and getting better...

my basement is neering completion and I want to get something setup for when I am away from home and want to watch nfl or nhl while im out.... live of course....

I use a sling box, and have a cable box assigned to it. It has to be SD only though, HD chokes so bad it's not worth the aggravation, for me anyway. The sling client is through a Roku which is connected to a special marine WiFi antenna. You may get better response if your fully wired