Setting up a PVR with Freeview / TopupTV

[MrCarl]

Hi,

I have been thinking about setting up a system with a Hauppauge MediaMVP to control the front end, but wondered whats the best capture device/tuner to get.

What I was wondering though is on the screen shots it shows channels you get on digital tv, but all the recommended tv tuners are just normal terestrial tv tuners and shouldnt be able to pick up digital channels.

What id like to be able to do is pick up Freeview & TopupTV which at the moment gets picked up though an old OnDigital reciever into my TV, but id like to be able to have it all accesible on a PVR system like this.

Can someone explain a bit more how these things work with digital tv recievers??

Thanks

Carl

[mjp]

Hi,

I have a digital cable decoder that I use.
My setup is as follows, the decoder sends the decoded signal to my capture card, that then, records, displays, etc. If I need to change channel, my system uses a USB-UIRT to send a signal to my cable box to change the channel on that.
What this means is I only ever recieve 1 channel into the PC, but I make it look like all of them by controlling the cable decoder from the PC.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

(BTW, there are some digital decoders available for PC's)

[MrCarl]

Quote[/b] (mjp @ Aug. 31 2004,08:07)]Hi,

I have a digital cable decoder that I use.
My setup is as follows, the decoder sends the decoded signal to my capture card, that then, records, displays, etc. If I need to change channel, my system uses a USB-UIRT to send a signal to my cable box to change the channel on that.
What this means is I only ever recieve 1 channel into the PC, but I make it look like all of them by controlling the cable decoder from the PC.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

(BTW, there are some digital decoders available for PC's)

Ahh... I see, so you dont actually need a tv tuner card as such, you can use a normla video capture card...

Does this mean I could save some money and buy a cheaper capture card like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/custome....d=54154

Rather than a more expensive PVR/tuner card??

[colin]

The card also needs to be supported by GBPVR. Currently it only supports cards that have hardware MPEG-2 encoding and even at that you would need to check with Sub.

Colin.