Which hardware do I need to connect a Sky Digibox to PC?

[tommyboyo]

Hi, I've got access to a digibox with full sky channel package, but no TV, nightmare! I'm looking for a way to connect up to the pc to watch through my 19" widescreen monitor (which is a cheapie, so only has vga input)

My system isn't the fastest in the world but if the skybox is doing most of the work the all the PC would need to do is relay the signal right?

I was thinking something along these lines: getting a tv card such as this, then using a scart to composite lead to take the signal from the digibox to the card (sound would be handled by my external stereo system) . Channel surfing etc would then be handled by the skybox with the card just displaying the picture.

Will this work? do you think it's going to be the best/fastest solution or is there something else I can consider?

Thanks for any input

 

[tommyboyo]

oh right...is that really terrible then? or will it look about the same as divx quality?

 

[Flying-Q]

Are there any coding/scrambling/drm issues to be considered?

 

[Flying-Q]

What I was thinking was that you cannot record some of the pay per view channels even though you can watch them (naturally) and I was given to understand that this was a form of drm. Would the TV card in the PC be seen by the Sky box as the equivalent of a recording device? Would it haence not display the picture?


Q

 

[darkstar782]

Sky boxes receive MPEG2 encoded video in a standard definition format, except the SkyHD boxes which cost £299 ($600) as opposed to free and you don't have or you'd know

PAL TV is 576 visible lines, 50Hz interlaced (so 25FPS).

The Sky box will decrypt the Videoguard MPEG2 stream and output it as an analogue composite or RGB analogue stream in the case of more recent boxes.

You cannot get an MPEG2 signal free of encoding from the Digibox. Hell, you cannot get any digital signal at all out of it. (unless you have one of the aforementioned SkyHD boxes)

As such, your TV Card solution is the only one, although the quality wont be great, it will be no worse than a standard definition TV.

Sky DO protect some of their broadcasts with Macrovision, which is supposed to prevent recording to VCR, but this shouldn't affect you.

Recording to .avi files on the PC is possible with the right TV card, but you are then going MPEG2->Analogue->whatever codec, and there will be quality lost.