Cable through tuner card

[knmwt15000]

Hi All,

I've been reading about putting cable through my pc for a while and currently have been using a pinnacle 310i to get freeview tv into my box. Yesterday I thought I'd have a play and run the cable feed into the card. (Yes I know it's much better to use a dvb-c card with a ci but this will be the next step.)

The first thing I did was to hook the rf cable up to the antenna in on the card and ran through the tuning process for analogue. It detected the rf freqency from the cable box and I can now watch and record whatever channel I've got the ntl box switched to. This works great but there is only one channel in the guide and I can only change channels using the ntl remote.

Next. I tried to set it up by going through the 'do you have a set top box' routine but when I do this it and it asks me where the signal is coming from I don't get anything.

it asks for
channel number
s-video
composite video

anybody have an idea of what the deal is? (FYI this is for vista mce)

thanks

[Confused Stu]

What you've currently got running is the PC taking and displaying the video output from the cable box via the RF signal. This is what is referred to when people talk about an analogue card or signal. The next step ("do you have a set top box") is designed to still take the output from a cable box, either via S-video or composite, but for the PC to control the cable box by means of IR blasters - you tell the PC to change channel, PC pretends it's a TV remote and tells the cable box to change channel via IR signal,.

To get what you're after you will NEED a DVB-C card and plug in the feed INTO the cable box into the card, not the cable box output as you've currently got. This way the PC is doing the decoding, channel changing and so on inside. Your cable box is then out of the loop completely as the PC is doing all the work. This is also the only way to watch one channel while recording another short of having two cable boxes next to the PC (you'll need two cards though for this).

Have a read around the forum and you'll find details of what you'll need to do this. It will be costly and time consuming (especially if you want to use Media Centre) but it's definitely worth it when it's up and running.

[knmwt15000]

so let me get this straight

- you can't use rf from the stb if you want to do the controlling the stb with the blaster? (i did read something about setting the channel to 52)

- you can do it by using the s-video in - in which case I could use the s-video in that I have on my 310i card to connect the scart out on the stb to my pc?

thanks

[Kalvink]

You can control the set top box with MCE or VMC easily.

you have done everything correctly, I asume you are using a pace STB what you need is one of these......

http://www.letsautomate.com/11220.cfm

[knmwt15000]

Hi,

I have the samsung box. I have the IR 'eyepatch' that plugs into the back of my microsoft remote IR receiver and is placed in front of the box.

However, without seeing the video feed there's no point me progressing to this part of the wizard...