C-band or digital cable vs dishtv / directv for sdtv via projector

I have a DSR920 4DTV and digital cable from Comcast iun Seattle


Without a doubt the big dish has a superior image in all respects on all feeds, analog or digital. The benefit of getting the feeds directly from the studio rather than a middle-man rebroadcasters is undeniable. The draw back is that the current hardware sucks as far as features go. Fine for just watching live TV but there is pretty much ZERO PVR integration out there. You can hack it together but it's not as slick as a DirecTivo or DCT6812 /w Microsoft TV Foundation. I use a Toshiba RD-X2 DVD/Harddisk recorder for the big dish.


Digital cable looks about the same as DirecTV on the digital 480i SD feeds and superior on the analog feeds, depending on your service provider of course and the age of your cable system. Comcast just spent a bucket of cash upgrading the system here in the Seattle area after taking it over from AT&T and as a result at least where I live analog looks pretty good.


The thing you gotta know is that with digital cable all channels below 100 are still analog . Here in Seattle Comedy Central is on analog as is PBS. Although Comcast doers carry the lcoal PBS digital feed in the HD tier.

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IMHO none of the PC based PVRs, nor Replay, nor Tivo do the big dish justice in the video quality department. All of the currently available PC based TV tuners SUCK. Although the ATI Rage Theater 550 based cards look to be the first that don't suck (I've seen prototypes in action).


Even with the flexability of a PC, you're going to have to do a LOT of work to get it all seamless. For example with the 4DTV you cannot send an IR command to set the channel number until the dish stops moving. This means you need to program in a delay between the satellite change command and the channel change command and it varies depending on how far the dish has to move. Although the "tune-it-all" software automates a lot of this.


You should visit 4dtvforum.com and, funnily enough, the WiRNS forum at planetreplay. A lot of work has happened in the user community to get the 4DTV working with a ReplayTV, it's almost there and the work is applicable to other PVR solutions.


Anyway, I use my big dish for feeds where I care about audio and video fidelity. I use a homebuilt WindowsXP Media Center rig for everything else. My Replays have been retired.