directv on 8150-S1

Thinking about getting a 8150-S1 laptop with a 6970m vid card and I wanna be able to watch live directv in hd on it. I know i will probably have to have a directv hd receiver close by pc. The receiver have hdmi out on them and the 8150 have a hdmi port. Can i just hook up the receiver to the laptop via hdmi or is the hdmi port for output only? Other than that only thing i can think is buying some video capture card for the laptop but most of the ones i looked at seem to have only composite hook ups or svideo. Also they seem to be pretty expensive too Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. Yes i know about DIRECTV2PC but i wanna be able to channel surf/watch live too.

 

The HDMI port on the 8150 is output only. You'd have to do a capture card to get input as you thought.

 

Are capture cards cpu intensive? Should i get a external one or pcmcia one?

 

If anything, they're more GPU intensive than CPU intensive. But if you're looking at the 8150-S1, then the Sandy Bridge CPU/Nvidia GPU in that model should essentially make it as little of an issue as to not be relevant. It probably won't give you any issues running on that machine and only use a tiny amount of CPU/GPU time.

 

Hmm i can't really find any capture cards that aren't 170 dollars plus I can't believe how expensive this is getting.

 

You could always check out slingbox, which will basically stream your TV to the web so you can access it anywhere on most internet connected devices.

Or just spend a bit more (ok, considerably more) and get the Alienware M17xR3 which supports HDMI input.

 

As far as TV tuner cards, I believe you'll be limited to USB since these models don't have ExpressCard or PCMCIA slots.

 

The 8150/8130 has a free Mini PCI-E slot and a port for the external antenna/input connector to mount.
The tv tuner config wasn't offered on the US models and is empty if you don't have a config with cell/3G modem.

I thought someone would have mentioned that already but checked back and saw nobody had, I actually will be adding a tuner to my 8130 shortly.

The slot is easy to access directly under the bottom access cover on the left side of the laptop just behind where the battery sits.

 

as far as options go for capturing video such as Direct TV or anything that uses encryption you are going to want to go with a device such as the Happauge HDPVR 1212 or similar model. It uses the analog loophole and allows you to record any content you throw at it (has built in hardware encoding to offload the cpu too).

nice little device, just make sure you have a ton of free space to store stuff on.

I've got mine set up for MythTV @ home.

Link - http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html

 

I am interested in this also, please let us know which model you try and let us know how it goes.

For the original poster - this laptop actually has a port on the left side for a TV tuner input however it has a rubber stopper in it because the TV tuner was not included in Sager's configurations from Clevo. That means that a TV tuner can actually be mounted internally if you so choose.

Otherwise, you can get HD USB tuners for quite cheap. I think I got mine for $25. It's just a small USB dongle with an HD coaxial input. It's not HDMI though.