OTA HDTV and standard cable

[dahncke]

Is there a way to hook up standard coax cable for standard tv channels and hook up a antenna for over the air HDTV. How do I do this? Will I be able to switch back seamlessly and record on both formats?

[Zogg]

You can't right now, because BTV only supports OTA at this time.

QAM recording support (QAM is the HD over cable standard) must be done individually for each capture card (IOW the drivers are all card dependent), but it is the most requested feature in a poll that is going on right now. Hopefully it will be done soon for at least the most popular cards, but no date has been given yet.

Z

[rakeshagrawal]

dahcnke, if I understand what you want to do here, yes, this is possible. I'm assuming you are just looking to record standard cable. most HDTV / ATSC cards are hybrid cards meaning they can record both digital TV (over-the-air) and analog TV (regular cable or antenna) at the same time.

however, since most of the current generation of HDTV / ATSC cards don't do hardware encoding of the analog signal and because non-hardware encode analog TV tuner cards generally result in a lower quality picture and a much greater burden on your PCs CPU, we recommend against using these cards for recording analog TV. Most of the current generation of HDTV / ATSC cards are also hybrid cards, which means you can either use the analog tuner or the digital tuner -- you can't record from both at the same time.

instead, we recommend the use of a separate hardware-encode analog TV tuner card. these cards can be had for as little as $65 (see the Hauppauge PVR-150MCE -- http://store.snapstream.com/pvr150mce.html).

[psionic]

Originally Posted by dahncke

Is there a way to hook up standard coax cable for standard tv channels and hook up a antenna for over the air HDTV. How do I do this? Will I be able to switch back seamlessly and record on both formats?

For Standard (Coax) Cable: Use a good hardware based recorder like any of Hauppauge's WinTV PVR cards or their PVR-USB2 USB tuner/encoder box

For Over the Air (from an antenna) Digital TV, use V-Box Cat's Eye USB tuner or another similar device. These are pretty cheap, since they don't need to do any encoding (OTA Digital TV is already encoded). Without an encoder, the cannot handle analog channels.

Setup all of your sources and pick the appropriate Lineups in BeyondTV's setup... All of the Digital OTA channels will be in the 1000+ numbers, standard channels will be at their regular channels.. BTV will pick the right tuner for the right channel.

[enigma9o7]

You can do it all with one card too, it just requires a slightly faster CPU to handle the analog encoding. My kworld atsc-110 works fine for analog, although I gave that up months ago (and never used it with cable, but it would still work the same). It has two different coax inputs, one for analog, one for digital. Just hook your cable up to analog and antenna to digital and add both sources to BTV, works fine.

[Zogg]

My bad, read the post too quickly and had QAM cable channels on the brain.

Z