DVR Newbie Setup Question

[knott76]

Here is my situation -
I live in an apartment building where I am explicitly not able to drill through and walls to make room for lines from my dish (which I have mounted in a concrete bucket/pole on my balcony) When originally set up, the installers ran 2 wires from my dish into a closet on my balcony (which I'm assuming contains the wiring for my apartment) and now I connect a wire from my wall into each of my receivers (3 rooms) just like I would set up cable. My question is, if I decide to switch to a DVR receiver which I gather requires 2 seperate inputs into it, can this be done under my current set up? Or will this require one of the wires in the "closet" to actually run directly into my receiver. Any help or ideas are appreciated, DirecTV setup support wasn't very helpful as they don't seem to understand my setup at all. Thanks for again!

 

[cr0mag]

You will need two lines from the dish to the dvr receiver in order to use all of it's functionality. You can set the receiver up to use only 1 line, but you will not be able to watch a program while recording a different one (or record two channels at once). I was in the EXACT situation not too long ago with an apartment building and I spoke with the maintenance people for the complex. They were ok with the drilling as long as I went through wood and not their vinyl siding, even though the folks at the office were telling me no.

 

[knott76]

thanks...my apartment said there was no wiring in the closet either, but the installer opened it up and found the cable wiring...do you think I could get away with running the one line from my wall (where I have it now) and running the second one maybe with a flat cable through a window or something?...also, how would this affect the other receivers in my house? would they still be able to watch different things if i remove one of those wires and connect directly to my DVR receiver?