[mythtv-users] MythTV with AT&T uverse

Brandon Mintern bmintern at gmail.com
Tue Sep 23 21:48:27 UTC 2008


A representative came today trying to sell me AT&T's uverse plan. If I
had not already built a pretty expensive MythTV machine (4 320 GB HDDs
in a RAID 5, AMD X2 4200+, 1 GB RAM, 2 pcHDTV 5500 tuners, 1 Hauppauge
PVR-150), I would have switched on the spot (its 4 digital streams,
faster Internet, and lower price are all improvements over WOW). While
talking with the representative, however, I learned that the uverse
service uses IPTV, receiving only the requested channels on demand
instead of all of them as most cable companies do today. In my mind,
this is a much more scalable, intelligent approach to broadcasting
television and I view it as a step forward.

That said, it also seems like it should be possible to tune these
channels directly without the need for a uverse set-top box, by
mirroring the same protocol. I suppose the problem then is that the
received stream is probably still encoded, which doesn't really get us
anywhere. The other alternative, of course, is to connect the MythTV
backend to the set-top box, but is there a way to tune more than one
channel at a time? So my initial question is: Has anyone had any
success with MythTV and uverse? If not, what are the best options in
the midwest (Columbus, OH), where my choices seem to be WOW, Time
Warner, and this new uverse?

I've had this wonderful machine just sitting here for several months
because I haven't bothered to set it up -- there just seems to be no
easy way to get all the channels I want in HD while being able to
tune/record multiple channels at once. It seems the closest I can get
is to have WOW or Time Warner, have the two 5500s hooked up to the
coax, and have the PVR-150 (along with an IR blaster) hooked up to the
set-top box, but then I can't get channels like ESPNHD, TNTHD, and
STARZ ondemand in HD. Does anyone have any better-working
configurations?

Alternatively, if I can't get something suitable working, is anyone
interested in some great MythTV hardware? ;-)

Thanks,
Brandon


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