Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Solve HD recording with HTPC?

This would limit you to using the onboard video though, correct? No aftermarket video card? What if a HDMI video card were to be added to this mb?

You still can't record HD with this. All this is .. is instead of a DVI output it is replaced with a HDMI output. Its no different than getting a PC with DVI output and getting a DVI to HDMI converter. Mind you one big bonus is that you do not need to feed the digital out or stereo out of the PC to your display. The HDMI will carry both signals.
After market should be no problem with this as this mostlikely would be disabled once you pop in a new card and it detects a new card on your PCI express slot or AGP slot. I bet you would find a disable setting in the BIOS for this too.

Even more HTPC questions...

I noticed many cases labled specifically for HTPC have VFD displays and often remote controls. If I had a wireless keyboard and mouse, wouldn't that handle it? I've found some cases that look excellent, but do not have VFD.

I was seriously looking at this Zalman case, but then I came across this case from Silverstone. I like that it has two 5.25" external drives, integrated card reader...of course then there's the Lian Li

There are a lot of REALLY nice HTPC cases available these days.

That is correct.

You can this a step further get your learning remote to mimic your wireless keyboard and mouse and use your remote to do keyboard keystrokes and mouse movement and clicks.

Silverstone makes some nice cases, but I have to warn you about their severe lack of customer service. They'll get you the part, sure, after a very long time and several emails and phone calls...

Using my VBox Cats Eye HD tuner card along with MediaPortal I am able to record HD to my Hard Drive it just takes up a lot of space.

But is that HD OTA, or HD from cable/sattelite?

My entire house is wired with RG6, for now I'm just using an outside OTA antenna to get the local HD signals, haven't hooked a satellite system back up since we built the new house, to lazy listening to music and watching HT movies.

I think there seems to be a lot of confusion when the words "HTPC" and "HD" are mentioned.

Outputting to a HDTV is easy, recording HD is not. Right now HTPC's are limited to recording OTA (ATSC), not cable (QAM). There are a couple QAM PCI cards out there right now, but there is no official driver support for them in Windows. I believe the QAM cards come with software that directly accesses them so the QAM features only work in that software (which is rarely HTPC friendly). I believe there is some QAM support in Linux but you can only tune in unencrypted channels, ie usually the same ones that you can get OTA (CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, etc).

CableCards will bring encrypted QAM to the PC here in the next few months, but the only Microsoft OS to support it will be Vista, will never work in XP. It also looks doubtful CableCards will work in any opensource version of Linux (DRM issues). I am not aware either way on its ability to run on OSX. Furthermore there is evidence CableCards won't be available to the public thru retail or OEM channels. Only computers "certified" by CableLabs will be allowed to have them (at least at first).

Once all of this comes to pass, you can still use a DVI (or HDMI) video card to play back on your TV but the card will (very) likely need to be HDCP compliant, along with the TV. There is still a lot of gaps in information regarding this. But when you consider you will likely need to buy a prebuilt HTPC anyway, it may be moot as the company making the computer would have that all taken care of.

But here's to hoping for HD in DIY HTPC's in the future, cause I sure would prefer it to be that way!