Avoiding interrupting my STB recordings

[bstempel]

Hi,
So this is an awkward question, in fact I couldn't even think how to search for it in the forums. Everything is working great, this is more of a "consequence of my setup" problem.

I just got digital cable (using a Motorola 6200 STB with Hauppauge blaster changing channels on it), which appears to work fine. I moved the coax cable from my PVR-150 to the STB, and now use the inputs on the 150 instead, and it's all fine.

OK. The problem is, the thing could be recording just fine, but I don't know it, I come sit down to watch TV, start flipping channels on the STB, and I'm screwing up my currently recording program! The old way, I had everything going thru my MVP, and it would say "no tuners available" which was fine, so I'd just watch a recorded show or something.

Now though, I want the full 720p signal since it's available, so I go straight from the STB to TV, but there's no way to know if something is currently recording (except to go look thru my MVP each time, which is not a good solution), and so I'm at a loss.

Has anyone else come across this? I would think it would be a problem for anyone with a STB that wants to watch live TV without going thru GB-PVR. I have to leave my STB on all the time, so gb-pvr knows what state its in.

[zed]

Get a second STB and dedicate it to GB-PVR...

[Carlito]

You could try something like ParaLED to tell you if gbpvr is recording something...

[bdgbill]

I went through all this myself and eventually got a 2nd digital STB. Have one STB feeding directly into the tv for live tv, the 2nd box is dedicated to GBPVR and controlled by the PVR-150 blaster. The output of my PVR box goes to a 2nd input on my tv. Works great!

[bstempel]

Thanks for the responses, yes a second STB would work. But, I've decided the best thing for me is to simply split the cable signal, and have one branch go into the STB, and the other go into my pvr150 card. So now, I can't record digital channels by scheduling, but if I really wanted to record, I could just go to channel 1 (my auxiliary channel), with the STB on the channel I want, and just record for some amount of time, and that seems like a nice solution because I've effectively added another tuner (albeit a non-digital-cable one, but that's ok with me). Plus, I don't have to deal with figuring out how to get zap2it to show the digital channels in the tv guide!