HD TV tuner?

[shamgar03]

I have been reading reviews on TV tuner cards for a while because I am thinking about making a media center box. I am a Virginia Tech student and I want to record our football games in HD, from DirecTV. The problem is, I dont think they make any TV tuners with HDMI, DVI or even component video inputs. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Markbnj]

All I have seen are analog inputs for capture purposes. You could use a tuner with HD capability and spool the output to disk, but then you won't get the DirecTV tuning capability. If DirecTV has any channels that are unencrypted using QAM encoding, you could grab those with a card like the MDP-130, but I doubt they are using QAM, or that any of their channels are unencrypted.

In other words... application denied!

Oh, one thought, rather than look at TV Tuner cards (for which capture is, after all, an add-on), you might look at professional capture boards. Not sure this will be any more successful. I found a few just nosing around, all in the $200+ range, but most of them no longer offered for sale.

 

[Todd33]

HDTV on PC is very immature. Get ready for poor drivers, lack of software support and hours of tweaking

 

[kylebisme]

Iif your Direct TV box has a functional FireWire port then you can capture the compressed streams directly with that. I don't know all the details though as I'm still bugging my cable company for a proper cable box so I can do the same.

 

[shamgar03]

Originally posted by: Todd33
HDTV on PC is very immature. Get ready for poor drivers, lack of software support and hours of tweaking

Well I was planning on using linux....so wasn't anticipating alot of support anyway.
Mark, you know where I could look for a professional capture board?
And I will have to look into the firewire. Maybe I will just spring for buying/renting a DirecTV box with TIVO built in. Not quite the same, but until there are real HDTV cards I don't know if I have too much choice

 

[Markbnj]

I looked around, and I can't find anything. There are some really high-end boards from outfits like Curtis-Wright, that _seem_ to have what you need, but they cost thousands. There is mention of the Holo3D II, which supposedly has a DVI input daughter card, on a couple of forums but I can't find a link to purchase it. Price mentioned was in the $750 range.

 

[Rage187]

You can record from the back of the HDtuner to your pc via firewire.

if your interested check out this thread at avsforum
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=403695

I've gotten it up and running in about 5mins using both Comcast and Charter.