HDTV Capture Card - Which One?

[six_storm]

I've been looking around AVS and a few other websites just to see what card would be best to get in my situation . . . but here's the catch. Most people just do OTA HD channels to record them, they don't run off of a cable box. I tried doing the OTA HD channels last year and I can't get them where I live. So I guess I'm a little screwed. :(

Sorry for posting so much in here, I just really wanted to get this thing to work.

Basically, the Tuner card doesn't work worth jack sh*t but the cheap FireWire cable finally does playback and records up to 1080i. However, when I get my HTPC built, I want to be able to run everything under Vista MCE and this Firewire trick won't happen under MCE, but just in VLC.

So if anybody can recommend a card that will watch/record from a Comcast cable box with perfect quality and that works in Vista MCE, please tell me.

[schuey74]

Sorry for abandoning you man. I was had a nice out of town weekend. I read your past couple posts and here's my input.

I've only used the firewire method with XP. I would assumed there would be issues with Vista because of the DRM **** and you appear to confirm this.

As previously known, tuner cards all suck. OTA is fine, but has a limited amount of channels. But who wants seven channels? Certainly not you or anyone else I know.

Here's the good and the bad from my experience. I can playback anything from my cable box with superior picture quality, but I don't have the channel guide on the PC. I can record anything directly to the PC, but I can't change channels while recording. I can just record with cable box's dvr and then transfer at a later time, but it usually takes several tries before I get a perfectly synced result (audio & video).

I hope you fine a Vista solution, but I honestly doubt it right now. I'd go with XP for my HTPC right now and keep my eyes peeled for Vista solutions down the road. Remember Vista is only a year old so solutions will arrive sooner or later. Although I very much doubt there will ever be any "official" solution because no one wants you recording stuff to your PC.

[six_storm]

Sorry for abandoning you man. I was had a nice out of town weekend. I read your past couple posts and here's my input.

I've only used the firewire method with XP. I would assumed there would be issues with Vista because of the DRM **** and you appear to confirm this.

As previously known, tuner cards all suck. OTA is fine, but has a limited amount of channels. But who wants seven channels? Certainly not you or anyone else I know.

Here's the good and the bad from my experience. I can playback anything from my cable box with superior picture quality, but I don't have the channel guide on the PC. I can record anything directly to the PC, but I can't change channels while recording. I can just record with cable box's dvr and then transfer at a later time, but it usually takes several tries before I get a perfectly synced result (audio & video).

I hope you fine a Vista solution, but I honestly doubt it right now. I'd go with XP for my HTPC right now and keep my eyes peeled for Vista solutions down the road. Remember Vista is only a year old so solutions will arrive sooner or later. Although I very much doubt there will ever be any "official" solution because no one wants you recording stuff to your PC.

Haha, no big deal man. I really appreciate input! I got another tuner card and it's confirmed that Comcast DOES encrypt every HD channel they put out so I'm a little screwed. Also, my parent's house isn't in the best place to get OTA HD channels so I gotta wait for that too.

One bad thing about building a HTPC right now is that it's only one more year until everything TV wise goes digital and you will have to have a cable box to get TV period. However, I still want to back up my DVD collection and have everything at my fingertips so I guess I can be a little patient.

Check out my worklog in the Home Theater A/V forums!

[Lyme]

Six_storm for help with windows media center you may want to visit www.thegreenbutton.com (click on community to get to the forums).

Otherwise the problems your running into are somewhat like this:
-All cable and Satelite companies encrypt their HDTV signals.
-The klunky way to get a HDTV signal is by buying a tuner and having it control your cablebox (which is currently the only viable method).
-The non-clunky (pain in the ass) way to do it properly is with a capture card that will fit a "cable card" decoder.

However, the cable companies in the USA (because this is specific to you) while being forced to support cablecard, really don't. The only way to get a cablecard system is to buy one retail and have your cable company send someone out to put the card into your pc (yes, it is that stupid). Plus, it really doesn't work that well.

A good read on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/missing-cablecard-set-top-box.ars

Sorry that I don't offer any solutions for you.

[Banko]

The tuner is quite new and from the reviews I've seen had some problems with the first models, but it sounds like they are fixing those problems. That might be a good tuner but there is very little info about it since it's only a couple of months old.

How are you going to hook up the cable box? I'm guessing your going to use the cable box to tune the channels, then output them to your tuner card. That might be the only workaround for getting encrypted HD channels to work on the tuner card.

Looks good to me though, be the test subject and let us know how it goes. :)
Not necessarily he can get a Tuner Card with Cablecard support and ask Comcast for a cablecard.