Dumb Ar*e PC question

[GIMPTON]

Looking at the connections on the back of a PC i have seen for sale and wondering if my Sky+ dish aerial will go straight into the "antenna in" connection on the rear of the PC.

Simple i know but wont to make sure before i part with the readies that i can connect it to my Sky dish and use it the record stuff.

Cheers

[randlemarcus]

Probably not, but if its the same sort of connection (the screw ended co-ax thing) then your TV card might be a DVB-S one. Also you'll have problems unless you have a conditional access module for the Sky card. You might be better running some form of output from the Sky box to the TV card. Someone will be along to correct me directly.

[thepassenger]

Sorry but it won't work. Sky & NTL both require the use of their respective set-top box to handle decryption of subscription services. I *think* you can get a card that can decode the none encrypted stuff but I belive most of Sky's broadcasts do require the STB do decrypt.

Yes, it's a pain in the arse as I'd love to have an all-in one system for my PVR.

[GIMPTON]

Bugger, so the only way to record and keep items recorded from Sky is on the sky+ box or a seperate hard disk recorder.

[thepassenger]

GIMPTON said:

Bugger, so the only way to record and keep items recorded from Sky is on the sky+ box or a seperate hard disk recorder.

Pretty much. Although you can go Dish > Sky > PC > TV with the PC controlling the Sky box through something like a RedEye IR emitter... but it's fairly complex and to be honest it's the sort of setup I'd bury in the loft/basement. As you can imagine doing what the Sky+ box does would require 2x Video-in cards & 2x Sky boxes. Maybe even 3x depending on if the Sky+ unit can record two programs and display a third (I'm not 100% sure of it's capabilities).

As far as I can tell from poking around the internet the Sky+ box hasn't been hacked... so the only way to get stuff off the damndable machine is to go Sky+ -> PC and have the PC pretend to be a dumb VCR.
Now, rumour mill says that the Sky+ HD machine will have a NIC built in to it (again I'm just working with google, never seen one) so someone... somewhere... might figure out how to get the thing to spew it's guts over a home LAN but it's unlikley as I can see the HD box being sewn up even tighter than the regular machine.