TV Capture vs Analog Tuner

[snicholson]

All

After researching for what seems like an eternity I am now finally going to bite the bullet and move forward with a Vista HTPC solution. As per my previous post (many reads and no responses ) I have a need to support Foxtel cable through HTPC.

I want to be in a position to watch FTA TV and record Foxtel or alternatively watch Foxtel and record FTA, I understand this is the holy grail of HTPC which has been evading so many.

I believe I have 2 options available to me to achieve the above -

1. Run a dual tuner configuration - Digital and Analog and follow the Wixkidder hack detailed in this forum
2. I simply run Foxtel into a TV Capture Card and this would give me a more reliable HTPC solution and possibly better picture quality too.

What way would you recommend? Have you had your HTPC setup one way and converted, if so - is it better, what drove the change etc

I travel a lot for work - the worst thing would be to have an unstable HTPC that the wife wouldn't beable to use for whatever reason - the solution adopted needs to have and maintain a high Wife Approval Factor

Is there another way? Am I not looking for all the possible answers?

I am going to buy a Logitech Harmony 785 remote, could this be used to assist with Option 2?

I look forward to any comments / experience you may have.

[MperR]

Hi Snicholson

I'm no expert in all this, but I've got a Digitalnow TinyTwin (DTV) and a Hauppage PVR-150 (Foxtel) running together as per Wixkidder's guide.

As I understand, there is only one way to get Foxtel which is basically an anlaog capture using an analog card. There is no analog tuning.

In terms of picture quality, I've found that I can get the Foxtel through HTPC to be pretty much the same as Foxtel direct to my TV. I use an ATI HD2600XT and it seemed like the picture improved after applying the registry updates as outlined on the mammoth thread at AVSforum.

The holy grail would be a system that has DTV and Foxtel working with 100% reliable channel changes and automatic zoom adjustments.

What you can do is simply assign an arbitrary channel on you analog card for Foxtel and then change the channels that way (no guide). The problem with this is that there is a slight delay in the picture, so I always ended up pressing the buttons too many times (thinking that they weren't working).

Or, if you are happy to simply view the free to air TV over Foxtel, you can just set up your analog card only and watch everything through that. Not the best solution for picture quality though.

Regards
MperR

[abufijli]

I'm currently using the harmony remote with my setup and couldnt be happier, wife is also happy. The good thing about that is you can set it up so your red button would send a signal straight to the foxtel box while changing channels with the HTPC, you also have many more customising options. I think it is you best solution.

[snicholson]

abufijli

Do you have FTA through Digital tuners and Foxtel through Analog?

How do you find the picture quality?

With the Harmony remote, have you scripted (macro) the changes for the zoom issues experienced by people? I would assume you could do this, would be great to confirm.

Many thanks

Sean

[Lemon]

Hi

I have run MCE 2005 with 2 Hauppauge 1100's for digital and 1 1300 for foxtel analog. I connected the foxtel over svideo.

The foxtel worked ok except:-

• Picture quality was not great - colours looked washed out - good for cartoons, but only OK for movies. Did lots of fiddling with no joy.
• Channel changing using MCE - worked once I selected a slower speed. Not really usable for live channel surfing (I just watched foxtel live for that), but worked fine for recording.

Last words - MCE and WAF are always a challenge. My MCE 2005 works really well most of the time, but still hiccups every few months. I recomend having a set top box as part of the config for when the wife wants to 'just watch tv'

cheers
Lemon

[phillx]

I bought a Acer idea 510 which has an option in MCE vista for analogue inputs and managed to get foxtel to work with the 2 x HDTV cards. You need to set the screen resolution to 1024 x 768 to get foxtel to work on a 16 .9 screen. It is not the ideal solution but it does work and so far so good with the WAF.

[Precisa]

Originally Posted by Lemon

[*]Channel changing using MCE - worked once I selected a slower speed. Not really usable for live channel surfing (I just watched foxtel live for that)

I setup 2 seperate keys on the Harmony remote while its still in MCE mode, that directly tell the foxtel box to Channel up and down.

It channel surfs Foxtel a lot quicker than having MCE flash the 3 digit number in each time.
(but you will still have the 1-2 second buffer delay)