Setup box Cisco 4642 to TV Tuner Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2255

[Triwis]

Hello people,

I have a Cisco 4642 HD setup box for the TV signal. We receive digital encrypted signal. The setup box decrypts the signal. Currently, the setup box is plugged into the TV using an HDMI cable.

I recently bought an Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2255. It's a TV Tuner. I installed it in the HTPC. The goal is to get the TV in HD on the HTPC and watch TV from the computer.

I tried plugging the coaxial cable directly in the tuner. It was able to find the channels, but since they are all encrypted, I couldn't watch any of them. The Cisco setup box has a coax output. Unfortunately, this output is standard quality. Same for the S-Video output.

The setup box also has a Component A/V ouput (blue, red, green), but there is no such input on the tuner. Any idea of what kind of adapter I would need or what I could do?

Thanks!

Source
Cisco 4642 HD User Guide, page 4 Back Panel
http://www.cisco.com/web/consumer/support/userguides2/4029077_A.pdf

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2255 Installation Guide:
http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/manuals/qi_wintvhvr2250.pdf

 

[Paperdoc]

I have a Haupauge HVR-2250 unit (have not installed it yet) but it's pretty similar. You are right, it does not have any way to input an HDMI signal from a set-top box. The highest-quality signal it can accept is an unscrambled digital TV signal on the coax input, but your Cisco box does not put that out. The coax "Cable Out" on it is only a standard analog TV signal. Although the Cisco box can send out Component Video, the Hauppauge unit does not have that input either.

Your best choice for quality, then, is S-Video, better than standard TV or Composite Video, but not a sharp as 720p HDTV. You need an S-Video cable from the Cisco S-Video Out port to your Hauppauge unit, plus a 2-line stereo audio cable with RCA connectors on one end for the Cisco's Audio Out connectors, and (see below for other end) for connecting to the Hauppauge unit.

My 2250 system comes with two ways to connect external video and audio to the card. The back panel of the card itself has a round Vid/Aud port and it comes with a short multi-end cable that plugs into this. That cable provides a Yellow Composite Video input, Red and White Stereo Audio RCA input connectors, and a S-Video input connector. Using these with an audio cable that has RCA plugs on both ends gets you the connections you need.

My system (don't know about yours) also has a second connector panel that mounts in a computer case rear slot and plugs into a special connector on the Hauppauge card. This provides a second set to S-Video, Composite Video and Stereo Audio inputs, except that this audio input is a 3.5mm stereo plug rather than two RCA connectors, so your audio cable coming from the Cisco unit would need to be a little different.

Both the main Hauppauge card and the second connector plate of my system also have little 3.5mm IR or Blaster ports. The one on the main card is for use with a dual-purpose cable with the card. One part of it is the receiver for the remote control you use to control the Hauppauge card. The other part is the little Hauppauge IR Blaster transmitter that you would mount in front of your Cisco unit. With it the Hauppauge card can send IR signals to the Cisco unit to tell it to change to the channel your Hauppauge card wants to see. The similar port on the extra connector panel is for a second IR Blaster that also comes with the card. I'm not sure you you could use both of these at the same time, but I'm sure you could use one at a time OK.

NOTE: check with your cable TV provider about this. Some such systems have a limited range of their DIGITAL TV channels not scrambled. The Hauppauge card CAN tune in such unscrambled channels so you could get full HDTV quality (resolution depends on how they are transmitted) on those IF your cable system has any. To do this, you'd have to mount a simple coax cable splitter ahead of your Cisco box so that you could send one cable branch past the Cisco box directly to the coax TV input of the Hauppauge card.

 

[Triwis]

So it seems that with my current setup, the best I can have is SD quality with S-Video. While this is a little better than "normal" SD quality, I was hoping to get HD quality.

I was able to talk with someone from my provider that has a decent comprehension of technology. They do not have any setup box with an HD coax output. Like the 4642 HD, all the setup box with coax ouput they have transmit SD quality. They told me the only way for me to get HD quality on my computer was to find a way to connect either the component ouput of the setup box or the HDMI output into the Hauppauge card.

So now, I'm asking something a little different:
Is there a (simple and not very expensive) way I could convert the component A/V or HDMI output from the setup box so it could input into the Hauppauge in HD quality?
OR
Is there any other hardware, in replacement or complement of the Hauppauge 2255, I could use to get HD quality live TV on my computer? In the end, I would really like to be able to watch TV on my computer using a media player software like Kodi (XBMC)

Thanks!

 

[Paperdoc]

The Hauppauge cards are tuner cards at heart, not video capture cards. For the most part this is because none of the analog video systems (and Component Video is the best of those) comes close to the resolution and colour quality of current digital video systems. Thus, even if you have a way to convert, the resulting quality is only as good as the original analog system.

In fact, the Hauppauge cards CAN give you full HD digital TV signals IF those incoming signals are NOT "scrambled". Any current digital TV signal you pick up with an antenna from a nearby broadcasting transmitter will not be scrambled. That signal type is called ATSC, and that system of sending out digital TV is often called "OTA" of Over the Air. On Commercial cable TV distribution systems it is possible to have three types of TV signals. Older totally analog signals can be broadcast, usually on the lowest channels 2 through 13, for the convenience of people with only an old TV and no need to unscramble premium channels. Unscrambled digital TV can be broadcast with a system called Clear QAM. Then scrambled digital channels can be broadcast also, and those REQUIRE a decoder set-top box. Each cable TV provider makes their own decisions on what types of signals they will carry. Few carry analog any more. The Hauppauge cards' tuners can handle analog TV from OTA transmitters or on a cable system, plus digital Clear QAM unscrambled signals on any cable system. Not surprisingly they make no attempt to descramble the other channels and defeat the entire design of pay-for what-you watch. The original basic design for these cards was to tune in an analog TV signal and use its own dedicated processor to convert it to a standard digital file format that could be stored on a hard drive and reviewed later. With the advent of digital TV, the job is even easier because the incoming signal already is digitized in a standard format, so no real conversion is needed - the card can simply store it on the HDD.
But that only works for unscrambled signals.

These days when you contract for cable TV service most or all the channels are scrambled, and the set-top box you get from the provider has the way to decode them. Then the question is: in what form do they output those decoded signals to your TV or other equipment, both in terms of cabling systems and in terms of signal quality? Bear in mind that the cable TV operators are not the least bit interested in making it easy for you to snag their high-quality HD TV signals and capture them on a computer. They only want to sell you a way to WATCH the programs. Some will be happy to rent you an additional box, a PVR machine, that will work with the decoder to allow you to record some programs on it and watch them later. But even these boxes do not make it easy to take that recorded program and export it to another capture device.

So you have a set-top decoder box that must be used for any scrambled channel on your cable system, and that MAY be all of them. The only outputs it has are older analog systems for older TV equipment (not even including the best of these older systems), plus one HDTV output system, HDMI, which is almost universally available on modern digital TV sets. Actually, I have not seen anywhere in this discussion what real HD quality that Cisco box makes available on the HDMI output, but at least I expect it to be better than S-Video.

On the other hand, the Hauppauge cards never were designed to capture high-resolution video from other computer systems. So if you want to try to capture the digital video signals on an HDMI cable (plus audio) and have those converted to a standard computer file format for storage, you need a different capture card, not a general tuner card. I found some on one on-line retailer website by searching for Video Capture Card HDMI. Cards for PCI slots often don't have a HDMI output on them, so your feed from the decoder box can get to your computer, but not back to your TV, without some re-connecting. Some devices sold for capturing signals from your third-party gaming machine do have HDMI pass-though capability, but use USB connections to your computer and do not do well at compressing video to smaller files. Anyway, you can do your own search if you want that capability. Just remember that capturing, compressing and storing high quality HDTV is a demanding task requiring high-performance equipment.

 

[Paperdoc]

Thanks for Best Solution.