Digital Cable reception to a PC?

[swinster]

Hi all,

I have been trying to get my head around this for some time as to what to do to get our *** cable feed to a PC or distributed to several PC's. We live in an ex-C****-t** area and at the moment simply have our basic package (on a PACE DI4001NC) distributed to other TV's in the house through a variety of RF cable and wireless video senders. I thought there must be a way to get the individual channels decoded on a PC.

I have looked a various TV cards for the PC, notably the Technotrend Premium cards. These, I have been informed, can be used in conjunction with a soft CAM and various other bits of software that will allow me to record and stream channels to other PC's, effectively creating a media centre. However, the cards in question seem to be no longer in production and those that come up are are around £150, which I am prepared to pay if this does what I want. I have heard that Hauppauge make a DVB-C card, but again I can't find any info on this. I don't think this has hard CAM support so I don't know even if it will support soft CAM's, in which case I will be able to view are the unscrambled very basic channels.

However, after looking at this board maybe I can achieve what I want another way. There doesn't seem to be a lot of box mods for my STB but I am reading about the DBox 2 that can be installed with Linux and appear to offer media centre capabilities. Can it be controlled form a PC? What are the drawbacks? I can assume that there would be no interactive elements (so bang goes the extra BBC channels during the World Snooker) and such, but is there any other downsides?

Is the DBOX the way to go or would it be better to go with a TV card? Are there any other options I should look at?

Many thanks for any insight you can share with this noob.

[the_wizzard]

may be cheaper to buy the extra boxs you need? or do you want to pipe it to everyones pc? the dvb-c cards are all around £150 and usually can only get em from germany. i dont know if they can do what you want as i never had one,same go's for d-box. i'm sure others here may know about that?

can't see how you can do what your looking to do with one card\box though?

[swinster]

Just to clarify, it's not necessarily about tuning in different channels on different PC’s, it was more about streaming channels to different PC’s yet being able to control the main box (and hence the channel streamed) from any PC. This I know can be done, one way of another. The streaming part is exactly what a media centre is designed to do along with program like ProgDVB. I should also be able to control the main server remotely, but if I can’t I will always be able to use something like Terminal Services or VNC. The PC side of things shouldn’t be a problem as this is what I do, although I do admit that TV cards are not my speciality.

To get multiple channels in multiple locations I understand that I would need multiple tuners, whether these be multiple PCI cards, DBox’s or original *** cable boxes. However, with the *** box you are not actually decoding the MPEG stream on the computer and can only pass the TV signal to a computer via low quality analogue RF signal, at least I think this is true. I thought that I had read that with the DBox’s you could directly stream to a PC and I assume if you can stream to one PC, you can stream to multiple PC’s? Maybe this shows my naivety.

I was unaware that I could get hold of *** boxes without purchasing multiroom facilities through ***. Again, naivety may be in force! - Scratch, this I have just looked on Ebay for other Pace 4001’s, but that seem to be untested. But again, I do not know the necessary information to get these (or even my own STB) to decode all channels. I have read a little bit about fun cards(?) and programmers but I am not sure how simple this is.

From what I can see, the old Technotrend Premium C2100 was around £150 but is no longer in production, the newer C2300 is around £100 with the Hauppauge Nexus CA card at £150. DBox's appear to be going for £70+ on eBay although I can't seem to find one that hasn't already been flashed or set up with Neutrino. Pace boxes appear to be cheap, but I don’t know what other kit needs to be purchased to get one filly up an running.