[mythtv-users] Good card to buy for Comcast

[Preston Crow]

On 01/01/13 17:15, Jeff Breitner wrote:
> Scott Simpson wrote:
>> On 01/01/2013 01:56 PM, Fa wrote:
>>> Take a look at
>>>
>>> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Silicondust_HDHomeRun_Prime
>>
>> Whoa. That looks awesome. Do I need to buy a cablecard for it to 
>> understand Comcast or should it just work? It looks like I can record 
>> multiple programs at once because of the multiple tuners which is great.
>
> Yes, it requires a cable card.  And it "just works".
>
> I'm currently running 2 of them.
Yup.  The best part is that unlike a QAM tuner, the cable card gets the 
logical channel map from your provider, so by the time MythTV sees it, 
everything is using the same channel numbers that you expect.  So if 
they move around the logical channels to different physical channels, 
you don't care.  (That was a problem for me about once a year in my 
experience.)

You will need to get the cable card from your cable company. Verizon 
charges something like $4/month, but someone said Comcast gives out the 
first one free, though it may be different in different places.  You 
don't need to have them come out to install it.

The only downside is that you don't get any channels with restrictions.  
On many cable systems, all basic cable channels are encrypted, but 
flagged as "copy freely," so they work great, but premium channels 
generally have more restrictive flags and can't be recorded with open 
source software.