[mythtv-users] Dish Network Box and MythTV

[Woody Sturges]

At 09:58 PM 12/19/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>Hey everyone.  I use Dish Network as my Satellite provider, and I was 
>wondering if anyone here uses the same successfully with Myth.  I'm going 
>to be setting up a Myth box here at home soon, but don't want to do so 
>unless I know for sure that it will work.  It's, I believe, a Dish 500 box 
>that I have.  It's signal is MPEG2, if that makes a difference.
>I'm not sure if it's converted to analog anyway before it gets to the 
>card.  Anyway, back to my point.  I'd like to be able to use MythTV to 
>actually change the channel on the box itself.  For example, the card 
>itself would stay tuned to channel 3 where the Satellite box would be, and 
>then Myth itself could change the channel on box rather than actually tune 
>the card to a different channel.  That way, I could schedule recordings 
>and such.  Otherwise, it really wouldn't be of that much use to me, love 
>it as much as I do :(  Also, I'm pretty sure I do, but do I need two tuner 
>cards to hook up both an antenna and a satellite box?  We don't get local 
>stations through our satellite here and use an antenna instead, so that 
>means two connections rather than one.  Thanks for any help that anyone 
>can provide.

   I have the same setup.  I have the Dish box SVideo going into the SVideo 
input of my PVR250, and an external antenna going to the COAX input of the 
PVR250.  I can then use the 'C' (Change input) command to switch between 
satellite and broadcast.

   As for auto-changing channels on the sat box, I use Lirc (serial) and 
the jvc_change_channel script to use an IR transmitter I created (based on 
plans on the Lirc site).  It took a little (okay, a lot of) fiddling, but 
it works pretty good.  Myth uses the change_channel script to blast the IR 
to the Dish box.

   The only problem with the above is that I can't watch one and record 
another (only one tuner card).  I'm working on adding more cards to my 
server now...