Hello,

I've had my KnoppMyth PC up and running with out incident for close to 6 months now. Of course that means that I am looking to upgrade it a bit. Currently I am just using the Hauppauge USB tuner option. I am looking to replace that with something, but I don't know what that something is. Is there one card that would take an analog cable input along with an OTA HD antenna? Or do I need to get two tuner cards? I see the Dragon spec uses two AirStar-HD5000AV-PCI cards. Would that work for what I am looking for? Would that card be overkill for the analog cable connection? I was originally thinking about just getting a PVR-150, since that can be had for about half the cost of the HD5000, but is there some reason not to go that route?

Thanks,

I believe the HD5000 is an HD card, whereas the PVR-150 is not.

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KM R5E50; K8NGM2; A64-3800+; 1024MB PC3200; LG DVD-RW; Seagate 750GB; 6600 PCI-E; Onboard sound; Hauppauge PVR-150

Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear about this. I was going to get one HD5000 and one PVR-150. Unless either:

1) There is one card that will perform both tasks, or
2) The HD5000 would make for a better choice than the PVR-150 for analog cable. In which case I would get two HD5000 cards.

Tim

I am almost positive the HD5000 card does NOT have an analog cable tuner, only the ability to tune ATSC (over the air digital), QAM (digital cable) and maybe NTSC over the air.

I have 2 dragon 1.1 spec systems (4 total HD5000 tuners) all connected to Comcast cable and mine do not tune the whole spectrum of the normal analog channels. What I do get from them is the digital SD versions of the normal broadcast channels (NBC, CBS, FOX, etc) as well as the digital HDTV versions of those same channels.

I use an additional PVR-500 and a PVR-150 to tune the rest of the analog channels.

(and yes, once I had all seven tuners all recording at once...and if you have followed my problems with my harddrives from another thread, you can guess that my system was not real happy about it)

Ahh, I had assumed that since the Dragon reference system only came with the HD5000 it was capable of tuning analog cable as well. Thanks for the clarification.

So the HD5000 can be used for OTA and cable HD? How does that work? Do you have to use an IRBlaster with a STB?

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KM R5E50; K8NGM2; A64-3800+; 1024MB PC3200; LG DVD-RW; Seagate 750GB; 6600 PCI-E; Onboard sound; Hauppauge PVR-150

I think it's probably better as an "or" statement... I think you can set it up for over-the-air HD OR you can use it as a QAM tuner for unencrypted digital cable channels. I think the latter is still a bit of a hassle to set up... searching for QAM should uncover more details.

You definitely can't use the STB for recording HD... any digital outputs probably have HDCP on them, and there are no good solutions for capturing analog HD signals.

-nods- I figured it wouldn't do them both at once. Was askin' if it was capable of either.

What I'm tryin' to figure out is if I get the digital cable package from Cox, and plug the coax into the HD5000, will I get the digital channels?

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KM R5E50; K8NGM2; A64-3800+; 1024MB PC3200; LG DVD-RW; Seagate 750GB; 6600 PCI-E; Onboard sound; Hauppauge PVR-150

I can tell you how my set-top LG HDTV tuner (which does QAM) works with my cable company (Comcast).

I only get basic analog cable and cable modem from them. However, if I connect my HD tuner to a cable connection, I get just a few (but definitely not all) of the digital channels that Comcast offers, and I get the unscrambled HD channels... local network channels plus maybe 1 or 2 more. No ESPN HD, none of the pay channels.

I assume that if I was willing to go through the hassle of getting my HD5000 working with QAM, I'd be able to record the same channels. The problem with my set-top box (and I'm assuming it would be similar with the HD tuner card) is that it thinks it can tune LOTS of channels, when in fact it gets only a few of them. Maybe if I really subscribed to digital cable it wouldn't be a problem because they'd all be active. It's definitely a pain right now.

For more definitive info you will hopefully hear from someone actually using the HD5000 with cable... I use mine with OTA.