Brad, BeyondTV ( www.snapstream.com <http://www.snapstream.com> ) works with DirectTV. And you can control the channels by getting a PC IR Blaster (essentially a remote control hat you hook up to your computer that changes the channels on the satellite box). It will work with your ATI TV-Wonder and the Remote Wonder (at least it's on the list of supported cards and remotes you have and I remember from my troubles with my first TV card that it worked great with ATI's hardware). A list of all the hardware supported as well as a few IR relays are here at http://www.snapstream.com/Products/Products_PVS3_SysReq.asp <http://www.snapstream.com/Products/Products_PVS3_SysReq.asp> . The IR Blasters (relays) seem to cost somewhere between $30 and 70. Todd, the nice thing about BeyondTV is it's web controlable, so if you're at work and you want to record something at home, you log into to your computer via it's built in web server and you tell it to record whatever you want. Even better, you can tell it to record every instance of that show (IE the Daily Show with Jon Stewart), or only the new episodes and not the reruns. The only bad news is it won't run on a Mac ;) but I'm sure they have options for Mac users (TitanTV http://www.titantv.com <http://www.titantv.com> , or MythTV http://www.mythtv.org <http://www.mythtv.org> ). I tried both, but I found Snapstream just worked better for me. But it seems like an IR blaster may help you get the telepathy thing going. I'll be at lunch today for sure so we can chat more then. As far as what I've gotten from BeyondTV, the hardware cards seem to do better, but if your computer is sufficiently fast enough, you won't notice too much so long as you're only recording and not trying to play games or anything else while it's recording. However, you can't use the streaming server (for example to stream LiveTV or recorded shows over your home network to other computers on the network) with hardware cards, so it's a trade off. I don't stream to other computers so I opted for a hardware card. I have mine setup to record every instance of New Yankee Workshop (2 every weekend on HGTV and one every saturday on PBS), as well as some cartoons and movies that come on. You can set BeyondTV to automatically take the uncompressed MPEG4 and convert it to DIVX to save space as well (which I do, but I keep both files). Hope that helps... Jerrod -----Original Message----- From: Todd Walker [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 10:52 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Non work related, but computer related very cool Jerrod, I've got the Hauppauge but Dishnetwork instead of DirecTV - d'oh! Brad what I do with good ol' dishnetwork is separately program the dish receiver to switch to the right channel at the right time, run a direct cable from receiver (it has 2 sets of outputs) to computer, and then separately set timer on computer app. Recently I got VNC going and router table settings so that I can "channel" the PC from home to record something, but I can't seem to get the telepathy thing going to control the Dish channels on the receiver... On Apr 14, 2004, at 4:42 PM, Jerrod Howard wrote: You can buy a Hauppage PVR-250 and buy BeyondTV 3 from Snapstream. The Snapstream software has programming for cable access as well as direct tv, and the PVR-250 interfaces with it very well. You can get the PVR-250 for $150 local, maybe less on the internet. You can get BeyondTV on the internet for ~$40 or so. It's what I use at home and I know for sure it has DirecTV programming you can download. -----Original Message----- From: Brad Pazoureck [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 2:06 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Non work related, but computer related Does anyone out there use direct tv or dish for cable access and use a capture card in the PC to capture it with? I have moved to non cox supported area and am getting ready to get it setup and have a few questions about controlling the tuner. My understanding is that it can't be controlled though the PC like it was on Cox. If you program a show to be recorded then the tuner will have to be manually set and left on the channel before the recording takes place. Well just seeing if anyone else has run into this.... Brad