[mythtv-users] OT: FCC investigates cable companies' analog-to-digital migrations

[Anthony Messina]

On Wednesday 05 November 2008 04:54:42 pm Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> I don't own any digital-capable TVs here, so cable cards and the like
> aren't useful to me.  Just the one cable box in the living room.  This
> has obsoleted my PVR-350 setup and forced me into working on my
> pcHDTV-5000 to get it working with just the cable input (previously it
> was antenna only).

I just did something similar this week with Comcast in Chicago (basic 
service).  About a year ago, they sent out a bunch of *crappy* DCT700 boxes 
with only Coax and RCA outputs.  They are delivering the "must carry" 
channels in their native resolutions from all the local broadcast channels so 
you can get, for example WGN and WGN-DT (and additional digital multiplexes) 
over the cable unencrypted.

I now have a splitter whereby the channels I can only receive by STB are 
passed through the STB to my PVR-350 and any "free" channels are passed 
directly to the HD-5500 using QAM-256.  Works like a charm.

It was a lot of manual work scanning the channels in Myth as Comcast doesn't 
send out any channel id info so I had to watch each scanned channel and 
figure out what it was and edit the DB manually, associating the proper 
XMLTVID.  I then use the following SchedulesDirect caching config 
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-24.html#ss24.4 to get the lineups set 
up properly in Myth.

-- 
Anthony -  http://messinet.com - http://messinet.com/~amessina/gallery
8F89 5E72 8DF0 BCF0 10BE 9967 92DC 35DC B001 4A4E
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