I have a Media Center with a Dual Tuner Hauppauge Card. At my previous apartment, I only had standard cable with no cable box. At my new apartment, I purchased a new HDTV from Samsung, and am now using a Scientific Atlantic 8300 HD box. Currently I have my cable box hooked up to my TV directly using HDMI.
I would prefer to have everything pass through my Media Center. I know that you can set up the Media Center to control the cable box using the IR blasters. Is there anyway to hook the cable box up in line with the mediacenter, so that the mediacenter will get the HD output as well from the cable box?
Right now I have a splitter before the cable box, and one feed goes into the mediacenter tuner, and the other into the HD tuner, which sucks because its like two different systems. When I ran the coax into the cable box, and then ran the the Coax out to the mediacenter, the TV HDMI connection became disabled, saying the HDMI/DVI connection was disabled.
Does anyone know of a way to do what I want? Is there a card out there that allows a component or HDMI input for mediacenter? I'll even upgrade to Vista if it works. Any help is appreciated.