GBPVR + TV Converter Box

[sterlicious]

1. Will GBPVR work with one of these new TV Converter Boxes? I just bought one to see what channels we receive in our area but hadn't considered the other repercussions. Right now the Converter Box is inputting through component cables into an aux. input. Will GBPVR still be able to distinguish the different channels like this?

2. Another question that arose is regarding the internet. Our house formerly has A-B cable run to all rooms, do you think I'd find better quality service by connecting the cable modem to the B line, and the antenna to the A-line; or should I buy a diplexer and attempt to combine the two different feeds into 1 line.

Question #1 is way more important, obviously.

[sub]

This is just a cheap set top box, so its just the same as any other GB-PVR user that is using a set top box. You'd need to add an IR Blaster to your setup so that GB-PVR can tell the box to change channels at the appropriate time.

Alternatively, and a much better idea, is to add an ATSC tuner to your PC. It'd cost about the same an IR Blaster, but would allow you to record the original digital streams instead of using this set top box approach.

[sterlicious]

would that require replacing my Hauppauge PVR150 or adding something in addition to it?

[sterlicious]

Upon some Googling, I presume this means I'd replace the PVR150 with a WinTV-HVR-1250 PCI Express TV tuner (at minimum)

[sub]

If you have a retail version of the PVR150, then it may have come with an IR Blaster that you can use to control this STB.

If you went down the ATSC tuner path, this would mean buying another card, like a HVR1600 which would allow you to tune both analog and digital channels. Recording digital channels this way would be much better than doing the digital->analog->digital you'd get with the PVR150.

I probably wouldnt go with the "WinTV-HVR-1250" since it doesnt have the hardware MPEG2 encoder on the analog side, so analog wouldnt be usable in GB-PVR.

[sterlicious]

I broke the IR blaster many moons ago and bught a Firefly Remote. Looks like I can pay $84 for the HVR1600 or $8 for an IR blaster off ebay

[sterlicious]

Does anyone know if there's an ATSC tuner that will work with my setup?

[wtg]

Any PCI ATSC tuner could work for you. An ATSC signal is already digitally encoded and therefore takes very little CPU to record. However, your machine will likely be unable to play it. I can't imagine the machine has enough horsepower to play 720p, let alone 1080i.

The converter and PVR-150 are probably your best bet based on those specs.

[sterlicious]

thanks man, that's what I was assuming... and it will probably be years before I have a dedicated computer that's beefy enough to handle something otherwise.

[pastro]

Has anyone gotten a converter to work with the IR Blaster from Hauppauge? Which one?