Need a FTA Receiver with DVR

[SatelliteAV]

Thanks for the link to the HDD USB adapter! I just bought the powered version to play with.

 

[Anole]

Glad to help
I've had a couple of those for ... a year, I guess.
One seems to have failed recently, but that's why I got two!

From experience with a number of similar units, and external USB boxes, ...
... some of the USB converters, based on some chips, with some Windows drivers, seem to work better than others.
So, it does pay to experiment if your initial attempts are not reliable.


edit:
Oh, and one other thing about hooking it to your computer.
Some versions of Windows, supporting some motherboard USB chips, have reliability problems, too.
If USB 2 is built-in from the start, and you installed Windows 2k or XP, you're probably okay.
If you added in a USB 2 card to an older computer, I believe the cards based on an NEC USB chip, are more likely to be reliable than one with a VIA chip.
Again, if the VIA chip is on the motherboard, or was plugged in when you installed Windows, I don't think you'll have a problem.

 

[mastermesh]

I just use the DVB World Box USB 2 thingy. Nextorm is an amazing program on it that works fine as a pvr to record weekly stuff off of g10 for me. I use the invacom quad with two of the ports heading to a switch and then to the motor and then to the pansat and the other 2 ports head off to another switch that then heads off to the computer's dvb world box. This way I got the best of both worlds... I can use the computer as a pvr, let it record stuff (mainly movies off of WGMU, WMQF and KKTU) and do it's thing while on the pansat controls the motor and we use it to regularly watch stuff... I know the times that the recorder is set for, so know roughly when I need to move the dish to g10r... we usually sit on g10 anyways since we mainly watch stuff on rtn channels and fox channels there... we do occassionally visit other birds, but not too often... If your computer's set up right, and is fast enough, you can even use tsreader in this sort of setup to record individual songs off of some satellites as mp3 files! My computer's too slow for that, but I have a neat little workaround... I have the audigy that the pansat uses to get ac3 channels sending a audio signal over to the computer through a long ol audio extension cord from rat shack, and am recording music as mp3s that way - instead of as individual songs... works for my needs...

You can record audio via dvb world as mpg files, but that burns a lot more space than mp3s...

If I had a second computer, and could talk my wife in to it, I'd set up a stationary primestar dish on 30w and use it to record movie off that bird full time... I can't do that at the moment too easily since the movie channel tp there is static on my winegard dish since the dish is just a little small... signal seems to dissappear every few minutes or seconds resulting in really loud sqeaky sounds that are pretty annoying... primestar's suppossed to be big enough to overcome that.

 

[Mr Tony]

Thanks Iceberg. I'll be waiting patiently.

sorry its been delayed. Had stuff going on this week. Review will be up later today (it is Sunday here in Mpls)