NextPVR and DISH

[jrockow]

I'm trying to understand the benefit of using NextPVR in conjunction with Dish Network (or similar service).
When I started with NextPVR years ago I had a cable card, which was a very sweet arrangement.
Recently I've been playing with an IPTV service, which is a legally gray area at best.
I'd like to go fully legit, but if I do go with Dish would I still get any benefit from NextPVR?
I tried the OTA route but my location makes that impossible.

[Joram]

I don't have any experience with Dish, but if I understand correctly how it works, the standard setup is similar to that of a cable company, where you get a box to tune and decrypt the signals. If that's the case, then you might be able to use a capture device like the Hapuppauge HD PVR 2 to record the channel that the DVR is outputting. (The terminology I'm using at the end of that sentence may be inaccurate.)

The limitation of this setup is that you can only watch/record a single channel at a time from it -- there's no watching one channel while recording another. NextPVR will record the specific channel that the DVR is set to display and which the capture device is, well, capturing. You'll still have your Dish DVR of course, so you can do everything on it that you always could.

The main benefit I've seen from using NextPVR is that there is no limit, in time or space, to the amount of recording you can do. When I was researching alternatives to CableCARD last summer (as I knew CableCARD was on the way out), I learned that while many services (such as YouTube TV) will offer DVR storage, typically they'll limit you either as to the amount that you can store, or as to how long you can keep the recordings for. The storage in a box in your house will be limited to at most 2TB, while the storage in "cloud DVR" from streaming services may be advertised as unlimited but then will expire after just a few months, typically 90 days.

With NextPVR, of course, your storage is limited only by the money you're willing to put into buying HDDs/SSDs for a computer.

In our home, for the time being we've settled on a mixed system: Stuff we don't intend to keep indefinitely goes into the Verizon DVR, while stuff that we do want to keep goes into NextPVR. I've found that it's best to set NextPVR recordings for late at night or for midday when we're not watching or recording anything else, so that the NPVR recording function doesn't clash with whatever else we might be watching/recording.

More knowledgeable forum members are welcome to correct or add to anything I've written above.

[jrockow]

JoRam, thanks for your response. I'll have to look into exactly how much space and time Dish Network allows For recordings to see whether or not I feel that NextPVR would still be beneficial in my case.