In our new Satellite, HD-TV, Blu-ray and HD-DVD Forum, by far one of the most popular guides is:Turning your PC into a satellite receiver and PVR. Written by moderator Seán Byrne, this is a straight forward article to help you harness the power of the desktop to record your favorite television programs. The advantage of capturing a satellite signal for archiving to disc is that there is no encoding involved. Surprisingly, (or maybe not) due to this fact, a pretty much plain vanilla PC with a decent video card can handle the process.
Note that when recording off of digital satellite TV, no audio or video encoding takes place since the transmitted content is already in MPEG2 with either MPEG2 or AC3 audio. This means that there is no quality loss in re-encoding the content unlike using a capture card or TV Tuner connected to satellite receiver. |
In the guide, Seán gives you an idea of what is available for satellite tuner and personal video recorder software and hardware. In addition, he gives some recommended settings and explains the setup. If you are interested in trying your hand at this, or maybe you have some questions or comments, then drop by and visit the forum.
Source: The Club CD Freaks
Thanks, it's nice to have one of these in my back yard: A 1.6m prime focus dish (fixed), .6dB C120 Echostar LNB. My height is 6' 2" and that's me to the left 
I must add some more info on choosing a dish once I build up my knowlege on motorised systems. So far, all my dishes including the one above are all fixed.
For those who have the PC DVB card & dish setup, I would recommend attempting to record music videos to practice with and make a VCD/DVD of these. After this, recording & archiving shows, sporting events and other content should be fairly straight forward 
[edited by seanbyrne on 05.08.2004 01:10]
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