Using my HTPC instead of my STB

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SarverSystems

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 9, 2002
Messages
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I have Armstrong Cable, which requires a Motorola STB to get digital and HD channels.

I would like to bypass the STB and use a tuner in my HTPC to get all of the same channels.

Is this possible? I'm not sure what specifications I am looking for in a tuner, if its even possible.

I asked this very same question back when HD channels first became available in my area, but nobody had a clear answer.
 
Cablecards can be worth it - if it works for you. It seems that it's rather hit-or-miss with setup (sometimes it goes perfect, other times there are all sorts of issues). Cablecards are also a cleaner solution since you don't have to stack up a whole bunch of external equipment.

The price you pay though is content protection and in some cases inability to record certain premium channels (this seems to vary quite a lot by not only provider but region).

The HD-PVR is also far from perfect. There is no driver or native support for it with Media Center. It is however supported by SageTV and several other Media Center alternatives. The HD-PVRs are also known to suffer from varying hardware issues (like requiring weekly, or more, hard resets).

Where do you live? The best solution for you may just be using a tuner to capture OTA HD channels.
 
visionviper said:
Cablecards can be worth it - if it works for you. It seems that it's rather hit-or-miss with setup (sometimes it goes perfect, other times there are all sorts of issues). Cablecards are also a cleaner solution since you don't have to stack up a whole bunch of external equipment.

The price you pay though is content protection and in some cases inability to record certain premium channels (this seems to vary quite a lot by not only provider but region).

The HD-PVR is also far from perfect. There is no driver or native support for it with Media Center. It is however supported by SageTV and several other Media Center alternatives. The HD-PVRs are also known to suffer from varying hardware issues (like requiring weekly, or more, hard resets).

Where do you live? The best solution for you may just be using a tuner to capture OTA HD channels.
Click to expand...

All of this is true to an extent. One other thing to consider with cablecard tuners is that many providers are going to SDV and there isnt a viable SDV adapter available for the cablecard tuners like there is for tivo; It is likely that over time you will lose more and more channels unless they finally bring out a proper adapter.

The HD-PVR is far from perfect as well, but with the unofficial drivers integration is pretty seemless in windows MC, and with regards to hardware, i think most of the hardware issues have been sorted out for the most part (minus the built in IR blaster causing stability problems) however there were definitely issues early on.

While I think you could get acceptable stability out of the tuners now i havent tested it much; for me its a non issue as I turn off my STB and HD-PVR most nights. It really is simple to turn the HD-PVRs on and off, though if you did have them in a server closet it could get annoying from time to time.

If anyone is interested i can attempt a "long term" stability test with the tuner and leave it on for a week or so to see if any problems arise.
 
With Windows you can not stream any live tv source to another HTPC (you can watch recorded shows), however, you can stream a live tv source to an extender. The HD-PVR will stream to the xbox 360, however that is the only extender that will work with the HD-PVR's stream.
 
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