[mythtv-users] Freeview channels on UK Sky Dish. FTA vs FTV? CAM required?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Fri Dec 15 20:06:23 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 19:31 +0000, Stroller wrote:
> A greater number of channels are, however, "free to view" but  
> nevertheless encrypted (FTV). As I understand it you can watch these  
> with a purchase of a £20 "freesat viewing card" if you "already have  
> a Sky box & dish". <http://www.freesatfromsky.co.uk/?pID=6>
> 
> Does this sound correct so far? Anyone know?

Sounds about right. My understanding is that this is due to
licensed content which they are only allowed to broadcast in
the UK, but unfortunately the signal spills over to the
Netherlands so they had to implement this expensive CAM scheme
in order to deny English language programming to the Dutch;
presumably it would either be more expensive to relicense the
content for spillover broadcast in the Netherlands, or it is
just politically unacceptable to give free English language
programming to the Dutch.

> but it's not clear to me if  
> CAMs are compatible with MythTV, whether only certain models of CAM  
> are, or what.

MythTV will work with CAMs supported by the DVB drivers, but none
of the regular MythTV developers use CAMs so bugs are only fixed
when someone sends us a patch and it gets reviewed and accepted.
So it takes a while to fix bugs, and you may have to do it yourself.

-- Daniel



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