NTL box to HTPC and Sky

kbc · 17 Jun 2006 at 19:07

gam3r said:
My hd on my HTPC just blew

I see... what happened?

What about an "AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm" ?

I'm hoping such system would provide enough room for upgrades in the future - should it need it. If I intend to load Vista onto it, it may mean I'd need a different TV card as the PVR-500 only operates on MCE.

fornowagain · 17 Jun 2006 at 19:36

I had a look around found this in stock. ADA3800BPBOX

"AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 64 bit 512k L2 Cache" 2400Mhz for £95.16

kbc · 17 Jun 2006 at 19:55

fornowagain said:
I had a look around found this in stock. ADA3800BPBOX

"AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 64 bit 512k L2 Cache" 2400Mhz for £95.16

Good price - I think I'll opt for one of those instead of a more hefty dual core.

fornowagain · 17 Jun 2006 at 21:17

OK looked at the manual. So you have three defined inputs. All of them also come out of the the monitor connection as s-video, not that it helps. For the resolution of the panel 1024x768. To record and watch freeview and cable/sky. Stick to the s-video connection its cheaper. Look for a nice DVB-T card with an s-video external capture (you may need an RGB to s-video converter depending on the STB). The RGB will be better, but at that res, its may not be worth the expense. Minimum of £210 for a sweetpot RGB/component capture card with RGBs/RGsB cable, although the sweetspot is a great card. You could also connect at the same time the RGB-scart from the cable/sat to input 1 for a little sharper image.

Energize · 17 Jun 2006 at 21:24

Can you tell us what inputs and outputs all the equipment has?

Also if your connecting to an amp its a good idea to get a soundcard with digital out.

fornowagain · 17 Jun 2006 at 22:08

The X-Mystique has a DD coax.

kbc · 18 Jun 2006 at 01:39

fornowagain said:
OK looked at the manual. So you have three defined inputs. All of them also come out of the the monitor connection as s-video, not that it helps. For the resolution of the panel 1024x768. To record and watch freeview and cable/sky. Stick to the s-video connection its cheaper. Look for a nice DVB-T card with an s-video external capture (you may need an RGB to s-video converter depending on the STB). The RGB will be better, but at that res, its may not be worth the expense. Minimum of £210 for a sweetpot RGB/component capture card with RGBs/RGsB cable, although the sweetspot is a great card. You could also connect at the same time the RGB-scart from the cable/sat to input 1 for a little sharper image.

Hmm... Just to clarify... are we saying that this will provide the connections from the plasma tuner box to the HTPC and is sufficient without an additional tuner? I'm assuming the capture card you've mentioned doesn't have a tuner? Are we talking about the "SweetSpot Video Processor" ?

Energize · 18 Jun 2006 at 01:56

kbc said:
Hmm... Just to clarify... are we saying that this will provide the connections from the plasma tuner box to the HTPC and is sufficient without an additional tuner? I'm assuming the capture card you've mentioned doesn't have a tuner? Are we talking about the "SweetSpot Video Processor" ?

Your best off getting 2 scart capture cards connecting the set-top boxes to them, use ffdshow to improve the image within mce and use dvi out to the tv and coax to the amp. Simplest way of doing things.

Sky's svideo out is messed up so s-vid from sky wont work, using a scart>s-vid adaptor will probably give you a black and white image as well.

kbc · 18 Jun 2006 at 12:31

Energize said:
Your best off getting 2 scart capture cards connecting the set-top boxes to them, use ffdshow to improve the image within mce and use dvi out to the tv and coax to the amp. Simplest way of doing things.

Sky's svideo out is messed up so s-vid from sky wont work, using a scart>s-vid adaptor will probably give you a black and white image as well.

Hi, do you mean one standard capture card and another with an RGB connection for Sky?

fornowagain · 18 Jun 2006 at 13:47

Energize said:
Your best off getting 2 scart capture cards connecting the set-top boxes to them, use ffdshow to improve the image within mce and use dvi out to the tv and coax to the amp. Simplest way of doing things.

Sky's svideo out is messed up so s-vid from sky wont work, using a scart>s-vid adaptor will probably give you a black and white image as well.

What's a scart capture card?

I've not had much success getting ffdshow to postprocess a live mpeg stream, once its captured it worked fine. I would be nice to upscale a PAL feed without a proper hardware scaler. I stopped using ffdshow since it started killing the Cyberlink HD codecs.

RGB capture cards are very expensive for what they are (with the cable maybe 10x the s-video card). Its got to be cheaper to switch the inputs rather than use a second card. The sweetspot-rgb can switch between inputs like RGB or two s-video'.

The three different Sky digiboxes I have all work well with s-video. Any chroma offsets are easily corrected. As I said bitrates are low, artifacts aplenty, s-video can be a bit soft, I wouldn't want to watch it over about 60". The new DVB-S2 cards look like a good option for sat, £88 will get the BBCHD MPEG4 streams on astra.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136647

Pics from both feeds, same settings. The RGB is clearer and freeview is a bit less blocky. Bear in mind this an SD signal 92" diagaonal, at that size you can see every compression artifact. Either looks fine at 42"

Sky-svid

Freeview-RGB

And an RGB to s-video converter (not adapter) will work fine if you don't have an s-video signal. Often times the scart has s-video and an adapter designed to split out the s-video will work, they usually have a in/out switch. If you feed s-video into a composite socket on a TV it'll be black and white.

http://www.js-technology.com/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=34

kbc · 18 Jun 2006 at 16:26

OK... on the lines of "buying" - I should be getting a single TV capture card to support the 2 boxes: NTL, Sky...?

Are we saying that I should be connecting both set-top boxes via the plasma tuner box or to the capture card directly? If the latter is true - I'd need an RGB to S-Video convertor?

Just getting mixed views and wish to verify the setup.

Energize · 18 Jun 2006 at 17:05

kbc said:
OK... on the lines of "buying" - I should be getting a single TV capture card to support the 2 boxes: NTL, Sky...?

Are we saying that I should be connecting both set-top boxes via the plasma tuner box or to the capture card directly? If the latter is true - I'd need an RGB to S-Video convertor?

Just getting mixed views and wish to verify the setup.

If your connecting 2 sources and want to record from both at once youll need 2 cards. If you just want to record from 1 at once get one. If you can actually get s-video to work with sky its fine, but I'm not the only one who has had problems. For best quality I'd reccomend using an rgb>component adaptor for sky, then use rgb>s-vid for ntl if they are both going to be on 1 card. Im assuming though that you want to record from both at once though otherwise there wouldnt be a point in having sky and ntl.

fornowagain · 18 Jun 2006 at 17:21

kbc said:
Hmm... Just to clarify... are we saying that this will provide the connections from the plasma tuner box to the HTPC and is sufficient without an additional tuner? I'm assuming the capture card you've mentioned doesn't have a tuner? Are we talking about the "SweetSpot Video Processor" ?

The problem you have is that the TV's tuner freeview goes straight to the panel. Now if I've read it correctly you could capture it via s-video from the monitor output as long as the tuner is selected. But, if you switch to the HDMI input 3 that signal will then appear at the monitor output. So looking at it, to PVR freeview you'd need a DVB-T card. If your on a tight budget, get one with a separate s-video input, then you can feed your external STB into that. The RGB sweetspot has no tuner, only lots of inputs. I use a twin tuner freeview PVR on RGB and a Sky STB on s-video, both to the sweetspot. The freeview PVR has its own HDD and I can rip the recorded programes over USB in MPEG2. It just evolved that way over time, the only advantage is the PVR records when the HTPC is off. Still there's no reason why you can't have a DVB-T and DVB-S in the same machine, starting from scratch that's pretty cheap, £100 for both. Don't know very much about NTL, but a DVB-C card and CAM may even work for that. And the HTPC has to go into the HDMI, no real choice on that one.

There is no point converting RGB to component for STB's. RGB provides the widest bandwidth and is the best choice for connecting devices like a Freeview box or digibox to your TV. DVD is different, to reduce the amount of storage required DVDs are recorded using component video, it is therefore better to connect a DVD player via a component video cable to your TV, plasma or LCD TV etc.

Energize · 18 Jun 2006 at 17:33

Component produces rgb video depending on the cable you get. Its all getting processed through the pc anyway so it doesnt make a difference.

fornowagain · 18 Jun 2006 at 17:55

Energize said:
Ninja edit

That depends on the source, not the cable. The component Y luminance signal contains the main picture information and combined sync. The other 2 signals contain the colour difference information. If you remove the sync from the equation then there is a simple mathematical relationship between them. Unless its in a master/authoring situtation maybe, there is no discernable difference in AV viewing and its very dependent on the source origin. It is a complete waste of time and money converting an RGB sourced STB to component to watch on a plasma. All you would do is introduce noise at the source, bad idea.

Energize · 18 Jun 2006 at 18:21

Its much better than converting to s-video which is the only other option with the sweetspot card you mentioned. Also because the computer is processing the video and then sending it to the plasma via dvi it doesnt matter as it will remove noise if there is any at all which is unlikely.

I have seen external tuners cheaper than the sweetspot though that have coax/composite/s-video/scart/component/vga inputs.

kbc · 18 Jun 2006 at 18:57

It's probably likely that I will not be incorporating Sky into the setup, as it makes things too difficult.

What I will need to confirm is the connection between the NTL box and the HTPC. Would it be wise to keep the setup illustrated in one of my earlier posts, therefore connecting the NTL box to the plasma tuner box and from that into the HTPC by using a single capture card?

Energize · 18 Jun 2006 at 19:12

kbc said:
It's probably likely that I will not be incorporating Sky into the setup, as it makes things too difficult.

What I will need to confirm is the connection between the NTL box and the HTPC. Would it be wise to keep the setup illustrated in one of my earlier posts, therefore connecting the NTL box to the plasma tuner box and from that into the HTPC by using a single capture card?

Its much better to forget the tuner box and just connect the ntl box to the capture card, then connect your pc to the tv using dvi and amp using coax or fibre, that way you can improve the image on your tv with programs like dscaler and ffdshow.

fornowagain · 18 Jun 2006 at 19:27

Energize said:
Its much better than converting to s-video which is the only other option with the sweetspot card you mentioned. Also because the computer is processing the video and then sending it to the plasma via dvi it doesnt matter as it will remove noise if there is any at all which is unlikely.

I have seen external tuners cheaper than the sweetspot though that have coax/composite/s-video/scart/component/vga inputs.

The sweetspot video processor will capture component, RGB, multiple s-video or composite RF. From lesson 101, simple application of signal to noise ratios, any noise is amplified and requires more processing to clean it up and that adds artifacts, all waveform conversions have a SNR. The cleaner the signal the better. The source is RGB, stick to RGB, if the source is YUV, you get the idea its not rocket science. The main drawback of RGB is the sync control, not bandwidth IQ.

Not a TV card.

#
Features & Specifications
Up to 8 video connections!
# 1 x 26-Pin Parallel Digital Interface (PDI)
# 1 x RGB (RGBS, RGsB)
# 1 x Component (Y,Pb,Pr)
# 2 x S-Video
# 7 x Composite

kbc · 18 Jun 2006 at 19:30

Energize said:
Its much better to forget the tuner box and just connect the ntl box to the capture card, then connect your pc to the tv using dvi and amp using coax or fibre, that way you can improve the image on your tv with programs like dscaler and ffdshow.

That sounds much simpler, would the "Hauppage PVR-500" or the "Fusion HDTV DVB-T TV Tuner Card" be up to the job?

Are we saying that this solution will give the best picture quality for both recording/watching as well as audio or is there still more thinking to do - ideally I'd like to get the setup right the first time round.