[SKYWLKR]

I am renting a Cox DVR but I have an HTPC that I use to time shift and record standard cable.


I want to be able to record the HD and Digital chanels without the COX DVR.


can I do it with a standard HD/digital cable convertor?

 

[shadymg]

you can connect your HTPC through your cable box & use an IR transmitter to change channels, but that's for analog only, not going to work for HD channels until we see cablecard.

 

[Naylia]

well, if you use SageTV you can record the broadcast HD channels Cox carries via firewire (stuff like CBS-HD and NBC-HD, not HBOHD or ESPNHD) and you can record all your digital channels using s-video or component out from your cable box to a pvr card in your HTPC, the only thing you can't record are the premium HD channels

 

[shadymg]

ah yes, the good ol firewire method, which does work with some cable boxes, and will even work with MCE from what i recall. takes some effort

 

[Naylia]

yeah MCE can do it to, but I believe it creates duplicate copies of the file, an SD version and an HD version and the one pointed to by MCE is the SD version, so I don't know if you open it separtely or manually overwrite...but timmmoore has done a lot of work on it


with Sage, it is more integrated but not really guaranteed to work (some peoples' combos of drivers, hardware, filters and decoders just doesn't seem to mesh), although some significant steps were made when sage started adding support natively for TS files which took a few steps out of the recording process