First of all, please forgive me if this has been addressed before, I did some searches, but didn't see anything indicating if someone was trying to run things with this setup. I'd be more than happy to read someone elses thread if it answers my question(s) please point me in the right direction if I've failed to find the trail myself.

I currently have a PVR 150 MCE in a shuttle case. Due to the single PCI slot I"m kinda limited in terms of adding additional tuner cards. The obvious answer seems to be to stick a dual tuner card in there. The PVR 500 seems to be the way to go in terms of that. I've never actually seen one in person, but my understanding is that you simply connect your cable to it once, and that it has a splitter inside that sends the signal to each of the two tuners.

If this is indeed the case, then is there a solution for running Digital cable on one tuner, and just plain analog on the other? I have one DCT that I'm looking to add to the system, and would be running analog on the 2nd.

I'm not sure if my problem is really a problem, or if I"m simply misunderstanding and making assumptions about this hardware. I'd like to know it's going to work before I lay down my cash and buy it. Anyone running a setup similar to what i'm proposing here?

Thanks in advance for any info.

The pvr-500 can accept a signal from a cablebox through s-video. Is that what you are asking about? The hauppauge website would be the place to learn about the inputs on the pvr-500. The pvr-500 does not have a cable-mouse/ir-blaster though. So you would have to control the cablebox through a rs-232 or USB port somehow.

I see that the 500 has Svideo, Comp, and Coax inputs. I guess I just wasnt' really sure how that would work..... I've only used coax inputs up to this point (which the 500 only has one of).

I would run my analog coax into the coax in on the PVR 500 and then would connect my DCT either via comp or svideo for the 2nd tuner?

I don't know what a DCT is. Is that a cablebox? (Digital cable tuner?)

You will connect your analog coax to the f-type connector on the pvr-500 that will give both tuners an analog signal. Then you can connect a composite and/or s-video signal to the respective inputs on the pvr-500. You need to setup mythtv so that different channel-sets are assigned to the inputs of the pvr-500.

Mythtv is smart enough to use the analog tuner to record when you schedule a show from the analog channel-set and use the s-video channel set when the show is from that channel-set. So just because you have a s-video source hooked to a video source doesn't mean you loose the analog tuner capibilities of that video source. Of corse you can't use both s-video and the tuner on the same video source at the same time.

One (small) thing to be aware of: the PVR-500 does route the analog input to both tuners, but AFAIK it only connects the composite (and I think the S-Video) to one tuner. Probably not that big a deal for you, but something to be aware of at setup.

Yes, DCT is my Digital Cable Tuner. It's my Shaw Cable Box.

So I'd basically have Tuner 0 setup as my analog, and would have only analog channels available.

If I connected the Svideo or Comp from the DCT to the PVR 500 I'd be able to get the digital channels there. This would enable Tuner 1 to record either the DCT, or from the regular analog Coax connection that is split internally?

It's sounding like this setup will work, i'm having a tough time explaining what I think will cause the problem for me....but it seems that the 500 has pretty solid support and that there are likely many others out there running a similar setup.

What you want to do should work no problem. The only trouble some people have is setting up the channel listings and assigning them to the correct video source inputs. But if you take it step by step it should be clear.

Perfect. I already have two channel listings setup on labs.zap2it. One for my analog channels, one for my digital. I think I'll be fine, just didn't wanna jump wallet first into a brick wall.

Thanks for the pointers everybody.

One more thing you should know about the PVR-500;

You can connect a additional back plate (PCI slot cover) to get a additional S-video and composite input so that both tuners will have multiple inputs. When I purchase my 500 it came with this extra plate but it seems it is not always included.

Anyway just as everyone said what you are doing shouldn't be a problem at all.