[mythtv-users] Firewire on digital cable box - what to ask for?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Sat Apr 28 15:25:01 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 12:41 -0400, Steven Adeff wrote:
> Many of the techs just won't know, its not a common thing and they're
> just not trained well enough. What you should do is ask to speak to a
> manager who should (better) know. It's an FCC mandate (and if you
> search the gossamer will find lots talked about it, I think it may
> even be referenced in the wiki) that they provide you one.
Yep, when I was dealing with RCN we didn't get the right box
until a manager came with his 'best tech' on the second round.
The sales people there actually knew about firewire, but not
the low level install technicians. The first tech didn't even
know how to hook up the color coded cables between the HD box
and the TV, he hooked up sound out to the monitors red and 
green TV signal ports. (DVI was very flaky).

> Thats not to say it will be of any use to you, they may have
> everything locked up tight with 5C.
Ironically RCN had everything in the clear on the cable and
5C on C-SPAN and many other things. Their firewire enabled
box also didn't work, but that is a different story. My happiest
story with Firewire in NYC is actually with CableVision, nothing
I subscribed to was 5C. But they encrypted everything on the
cable except for the local HDTV channels as per FCC mandate,
so all my QAM/8-VSB tuners were servicing the $25 OTA antenna. (There
are a lot more HDTV channels available OTA in NYC than are available
from any of the cable providers; this is probably
the case in cities like LA and SF as well.)

Not that firewire recording is ever a completely happy story,
direct QAM tuning works a lot better when you can use it.

-- Daniel



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