Dish & a PC TV tuner card

[silvanthalas]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but here we go:

My wife does not want me getting a tv for our office since we've already got 3 PC's in here, so I'm considering getting a tv tuner card for my PC. The computer is 5 years old, but from what I've read, the specs indicate that a tuner card will still work quite well.

What I'm curious to know is if anybody else is using this kind of setup with their PC and Dish and how well it works, if at all? What kind of cable connections are possible with one of these cards to a 722?

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[ItsMyLife]

I am using Dish with a TV Tuner card.... however my setup is SD rather than HD.

I do have an HD TV Tuner card that I pull in over-the-air signal from... it also has an NTSC tuner so I have my DISH hooked up to that side.

 

[air.jason]

Problem controlling VIP boxes with IR from PC.

When I tried to use Media Center and a tuner card with my Dish box, I ran into problems because I could not get the computer IR hookup to change the channels on the dish box. I was using VIP series receivers and the only way I could do good capture was to set the timers manually on the receiver and then on the computer a 2nd time. It got to be too much work and I finally gave up on it.

 

[RandallA]

I just setup a tuner card to watch TV2 from the 722 in my computer. Since TV2 uses UHF for the remote, I've had no problems whatsoever. Just grab the UHF remote and it works fine.

 

[IrishBrewer]

I also have a PC Tuner card hooked up to my TV2 feed so it is just SD programming. My tuner card is a Happauge with a dual tuner ATSC and NTSC/SD. I have had the ATSC tuner hooked up to an OTR antenna and that works fine but one thing I have been wondering is if I would be able to hook up the ATSC tuner to the TV1 RF out feed from my VIP222 and be able to get a high def feed from the sat into my tuner card. I have doubts but on the other hand, I've never tried it. If one could do this, you could use such a card to use your PC as a HDDVR, i.e. a HTPC.

At any rate, you can feed the TV2 into the SD input on the tuner card and you can watch/record TV. You would do this just as you would a second TV, i.e., if the TV2 was set to channel 60, that is what you would tune your TV card to and set the Dish timers using the UHF/2nd remote.

If anyone else has had any experience feeding a high def signal to a PC Tuner card via a RG6 feed, I'd be interested to hear.

 

[RandallA]

You could get your digital locals using the ATSC tuner but you won't get the HD satellite channels using either tuner.

 

[silvanthalas]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting HD on my computer regardless. It would be nice, but even SD is better than nothing.

So, thanks for the info. Hopefully I can get something soon.

 

[randman101]

Another option is a Slingbox. If you have a wireless network, it works rather well. I have a slow DSL, so the PQ over the net is rather poor. It will do HD, but I only have SD, so not sure how it woud look.