HTPC limitations

[LG_SW]

Hello,

My set-top Freeview box will allow me to access interactive content via the remote control's "red button". Will PC-based PVR allow the same?

Any advice much appreciated
Thanks.

[sub]

No it wont.

[herbs]

The only card readily available that can do this is the nebula but truthfully as an owner its not worth the price premuim that they charge for this card £100, you can get two digital dvbpt cards for that price and still have change left over.

[LG_SW]

Thanks for the replies.

Does this mean that a nebula card will handle the interactive "red button" services, but only via its bundled software rather than gbpvr? Or will it handle it within gbpvr?

If the former, I assume it would be viable to use gbpvr most of the time but switch to the nebula software on the view occaisions we use the interactive services. Is this correct?

Have just seen the nebula on sale for under £85 including delivery so am seriously considering this.

[johnnygal]

A word of warning. You can't easily switch between GBPVR and the native DigiTV software with the Nebula card. For GBPVR, you need to have the Nebula BDA drivers loaded. The Nebula DigiTV software is not compatible with the BDA drivers and you have to reload the WDM drivers (replacing the BDA ones) to switch back to their software.

There may be a bug in the Nebula BDA drivers also since recordings made with GBPVR have AV sync issues, preventing you from demuxing the mpg.

John

[dazzyb2k3]

I had a nebula card gathering dust for a couple of years and while the interactive support in Digi TV is pretty cool, you will soon get bored with other limitations. I migrated the Nebula card over to my GBPVR box a few months ago and it works great and i've noticed no issues with syncing whatsoever. It does have a problem with standby which is a recognised issue with the current version of the BDA drivers but I leave my HTPC on 24/7 so it doesn't affect me.

If you are going to use the Digi TV software then the Nebula 'package' is pretty good but well overpriced. If you suspect you might end up using GBPVR then do as herbs suggested and pick up a couple of 'cheaper' cards for the same price!

I recently added a Compro DVB-T 200 which I picked up for less than £40 and I think it beats the pants off the nebula!

[ricklous]

Theres another way. sort of. Not really a 'clean' setup, but anyway.:o

As you already have a STB, could you not get an analog card and feed the STB to GBPVR via a svideo or rf input on the analog card? I did this with an NTL box and it still allows access to the STBs interactive functions. if youve budgeted for £100 that would probably leave you enough to get a DVBT card to allow for recording while viewing.

Fairly sure that Sub has said in the past that live TV looks for a channel starting at one end of the list of tuners, and the recording service starts from the other end of the list, so if you set it up in the right order, *most* of the time you'd end up viewing a channel via the STBs feed, allowing you to use the interactive functions, and recordings would be done on the PCs DVB-T card....

Im not sure how dried in blood the above statement is though...

one of the negatives of doing it this way would be that you'd probably end up having to have your STB remote knocking around so you could control the interactive services.

[dazzyb2k3]

That's not a bad solution. Many of the DVB cards also have an auxiliary input - if you had one of these it would cut down on needing the analogue card as well.

I've no experience of using a STB with GBPVR though, so i'm not sure how complex it would be to setup.

[johnnygal]

dazzyb2k3,

I would really like to stick with GBPVR for recording with my Nebula card, but often when I like to save a recording for future viewing, I encode to Divx/Xvid demuxing first before cutting and encoding. I have found that the recordings with BDA drivers and GBPVR introduce 200-600ms of av drift in the demuxed files (have tried PVAStrumento and TMPGEnc). I wonder if it's the BDA drivers or the MUXes installed for GBPVR (have tried Cyberlink 5.0.1307 and 5.0.0813 and ShowShifter 3.12.0.2945).

Have you ever tried to demux and re-encode recorded mpgs. If you have done this successfully, I would love to find out which MUX you are using in GBPVR and which demuxer you used.

Thnaks,
John

[dazzyb2k3]

Hi John,

The Nebula BDA drivers shouldn't have any bearing on this wahtsoever. If you play the original recording in GBPVR (before any mucking around with the file) does it look ok?

If the answer is yes then it's unlikely to be the GBPVR muxer. I've had great results with all three of the versions you mentioned. I'm currently settled with the ss one though (3.12.0.2945).

I have had syncing issues in the past while using intervideo components but i've got very little experience of demuxing and remuxing using PVA or TPMPG.