BeyondTV with Converter Boxes?

[teststrips]

Has anyone tried to use BeyondTV with the converter boxes for OTA digital signals? My tuner card (ATI HDTV Wonder) has a digital ATSC tuner and also an NTSC tuner.... Was wondering if I might be able to use the NTSC tuner + converter box to be able to "upgrade" to a dual tuner device.

I'm guessing I'll need some way to switch channels on the converter box - Could this be done with the IR Blaster that came with my MCE remote control?

[eMpTy3000]

Good idea! I have no idea if it will work and I don't have any converter boxes, but it is an interesting question and I would also like to know the answer.

[ZetaVu]

You will be limited by the output from your converter box and software encoding, so you can tune channels to channel 3, but thesignal will be 480i and you will software encode as an mpg, the same as if you used svideo to take the tuned channels from your box. If you had something like a Hauppauge HVR 1600, you could use that svideo in and at least hardware encode the digital signal, but it still would only be 480i. Likewise you could get a digital tuner with the $40 govt rebate check, and use that.

[eMpTy3000]

ZetaVu - are you saying that we could buy a digital tuner card for our PC using the government rebate? I thought it only applied towards converter boxes.

[teststrips]

from what I can tell, you are extremely limited on what you can buy with the government rebate. It seems that you can only buy low functionality converter boxes (basicially external TV tuners for ATSC) - you can't buy any device that also includes a DVD player, VCR, etc.. you can't buy anything that would have DVR functionality. I HIGHLY doubt buying a PCI tuner for inside your PC would be OK with the coupons.

I wouldn't care about the recordings only being 480i - I actually prefer it to keep the file sizes down on my recordings. I may consider upgrading to something that has a hardware encoder if this would work.

I've never used BTV with any external tuner device - are the current settings/options good enough to be able to send IR commands for the external converter box to change channels? I think it would really suck to keep track of what channels are needed when + manually change them.

[Mike DiBella]

I did a while ago with an ATSC STB before the coupon boxes came out.

http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/show...01&postcount=9

Setup should be the same, unless your STB won't tune physical channels, then you'll need to create a custom lineup and change the physical channel to to virtual channel.

http://www.snapstream.net/configure/...eupWizard.aspx