Motorola 6412 and RTV - Eliminate one STB?

[punahou80]

Now that I have the 6214 can I eliminate the second STB I currently use for SD to my 55xx? That is, can I send the output from one tuner to the HDTV and the other to RTV?

[moyekj]

punahou80, you cannot use the RTV to reliably record from the 6412 if you have the 6412 also scheduled to do it's own recordings. The problem is that the 6412 will output whatever is playing/recording on the foreground tuner to all it's outputs. Normally (but not always) the 6412 will use the "background" tuner for it's recordings, but if you have 2 overlapping recordings setup on the 6412 you don't really know which tuner will become the foreground tuner, so you can't control what the 6412 will output in that situation.

Therefore you cannot reliably have the RTV tune the 6412 to a channel and expect it to be able to do that (if there are already 2 recordings happening on the 6412) or stay on that channel (if a 6412 scheduled recording comes later on 2nd tuner) for the duration.

If you can restrict the 6412 to no overlapping recordings you may be able to get away with what you want to do most of the time, but then what's the point of a dual-tuner. :)
Also, if all you care about is SD analog channels then you just take the second RF input directly into the RTV and use it's internal tuner (that's what I am doing). Then SD digital and HDTV you can record from 6412, SD analog on your RTV.