HD tuner/capture for DirecTV

[thinkbui]

Hi guys.

I've had an HTPC running Windows 7 Media Center for a couple of years now. I built it myself since I didn't want to have to deal with proprietary restrictions, as I'm sure many of you relate to, for upgrading and storing recordings on my own hardware. Even though using Windows does have it's own proprietary concerns, I'm comfortable with it because of the amount of support it gets. At the same time I have DirecTV since over the years it's proven to be for me the only reliable way of subscribing to all the networks that show the college hockey games I want to watch that are broadcast in my area. Together WMC and DirecTV are what I am sticking with unless there is a very, very good reason affecting me to change that. Here's where I used to maintain a journal for the build.

http://www.htpcforums.com/index.php?showtopic=10205

The catch though is that since I use the Hauppauge Colossus, there's no evident way of tuning to or even loading guide information of the subchannels (such as the relatively new Fox Sports Plus channels like 668-1), which is a pain when trying to time record on one of them. It should be noted that I have the Colossus's control panel set to use the tool at the following link to be able to control the STB via USB/serial, but the problem existed while I was still using the Colossus's IR blaster. So far I've been getting by though a monkeypatch method of manually recording on any main channel, then using the STB's autotune feature to tune to the correct subchannel.

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Util ... nelControl

Now I am setting up my second WMC HTPC and am looking at options for the tuner/capture. I'd like to take the opportunity to find a better solution that allows for tuning to these subchannels from within WMC if possible, but any documentation I find is for OTA DTV low number local channels and not DirecTV high number regional/national channels. I'm wondering if it's something wrong with how I set up the hardware in my first HTPC that I can avoid in my second HTPC (doesn't seem likely for what I read), something I can find another tool that I can patch this tuning hole with like a third party channel remapper (can't find anything and not even sure I'm Googling it with the right search terms), or find another card that natively supports subchannels (again can't find anything and not even sure if Googling it correctly). The closest I can find is a this method that relies on installing DVBLink for HDPVR, which I'm not at all familiar with and looks like I would need to buy a license. Anyone know of a better solution that plugs this hole or at least point me in the right direction like some documentation I could read through?

http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/2010/0 ... r/#more-59

[thinkbui]

It's looking more and more like I should write my own remapper tool since I only need it to perform a very basic function. Not really sure why it didn't occur to me earlier since I am a professional software engineer and all I basically need it to do is convert, say, "6681" to "668-1" from some kind of mapping table, but I still need to look at channel list editors since WMC's built in "Add Missing Channels" feature is only available when using a tuner card that scans for channels. I'll probably code it in Ruby since that's what I use professionally and this is so basic that it won't need fork() or anything else that's absent in a Windows environment, but as far as adding custom channels to WMC, I do see some tools out there that hack the guide.

I tried the Guide Editor for Win7 x64, but it crashed on me. Are there any that any of you would recommend?