Re: New setup with dual sky receivers - Need Advice

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From: Nigel Barker (nigel_at_hp.com)
Date: 03/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:51:30 GMT

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:29:08 -0800, "Chris Hughes(UK)" <Chris
Hughes(UK)@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>In the UK we can now pay a fixed fee and get the free channels on sky with a
>digibox. This is great for me ask I am unable to get Freeview through an
>aerial and do not want to pay a monthly subscription.
>
>I currently have 1 sat dish and a powered splitter that feeds 2 identical
>sky digiboxes with svideo out.
>
>I am planning on getting 2 PCI cards with svideo inputs to allow me to
>connect them to my "Not Built Yet" Windows Media Center 2005 PC. I plan to
>use 2 IR blasters to control them. I believe I need 2 Sky boxes so I can
>record one channel and watch another.
>
>Will this work? If so can anyone recommend 2 good video capture cards.

This will work OK. I had a dual digibox setup myself at one time but reverted to
a single digibox as I only had one subscription (& only want to pay one
subscription:-). MCE needs to have identical programming on both inputs which is
what you have. Are you sure that you have s-video out? Only some of the Grundigs
& the Sky+ box do. I have a Panasonic & use an RGB->s-video adaptor which gives
a much better picture than composite.

I would recommend the Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 PCI TV tuner card that I have been
using for several years now in fact pre-dating MCE. 

--
Nigel Barker
Live from the sunny Cote d'Azur

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