STB or Digital Card?

[flyswatta]

As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I switched from Cable to Satellite. I mostly record shows on the main 4 networks and was going to just do OTA to 2 of my tuners, and IR blast one of my satellite recievers or set up timers w/ manual recordings to record stuff on the other channels. (my hardware setup is in my sig)

I'm not a video quality freak (I don't have HDTV) but the OTA reception leaves a lot to be desired. A friend of mine in the same area has a digital tuner for OTA and the reception quality is good.

I mostly use GBPVR as a back-end server system and either playback (kids) shows on my TV or stream (my) shows to the computer via mapped drive. Additionaly I have a low WAF and so cost is an issue.

I'd like to capture digital OTA (ATSC is fine). I have a couple of thoughts on this and I'd like to get your opinions.

1. Replace 2 of my analog tuners with Digital tuners. May be the easiest solution but looks pretty expensive

2. Get an ATSC/HDTV tuner - difficult to find standalone tuners, and they are a little expensive.

3. Get an old direct tv/satellite tuner (can find them for $25). I'd need to get some sort of IR Blaster / serial cable (guessing another $25 ea?) Can I use one of these to get the OTA ATSC/HDTV signal and just run the output to my analog card?

From your experiences, what do you think is the best way for me to go?

Thanks!

[zed]

I went thru this a while back, too. I originally picked up a Fusion HDTV card and it worked fine but any recordings made with it could be viewed only on the PC monitor or on an HDTV (which I didn't have). If you wanted to watch them on a connected non-HDTV or via an MVP, you'd have to down-convert them to NTSC and I couldn't find any way to do that (there probably is something to do it but I couldn't find it at the time). I found a stand-alone OTA HDTV tuner box (RCA ATSC-11) on eBay that can down-convert and has an svideo output. I got one and feed it into the svideo input of one of my PVR150's, using an IR blaster to select the channel (basically your option #2). It works very well for me. The picture quality is great even down-converted, much better than anything I get off the analog cable or directly OTA. There are some similar boxes on eBay now along with a bunch of DirecTV boxes like your option #3. I'd imagine they would work in a similar manner to my set-up. An HDTV tuner card will probably cost around $100 and the ATSC tuner boxes are about the same on eBay. The DirecTV boxes sound like the best bet cost-wise. Just be sure they'll down-convert to 480i and have an output you can use (i.e. svideo).

[jbyram2]

What zed said.. I did the same.

I had a DvicoFusion5 that got great reception, but the HDTV files were too big and I couldn't display on the MVPs. I stuck with the Set top box, and control using Girder and a USB-UIRT, and input into a PVR-150 s-video jack.