[mythtv-users] Comcast Equipment Update

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Fri Sep 9 15:32:36 UTC 2016


On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 7:32 AM, Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com>
wrote:

> But while CableCARDs
> are mandated to still be viable for seven years(*),
> viability will, as always, be in the eyes of the
> beholder.
>

Thanks to everyone who replied on this thread. It appears that the
situation, as it always does when Comcast is involved, sucks for anyone who
doesn't want to be trapped in their corporate silo.

It is clear that my HD-PVRs are dead now,  or at least as soon as Comcast
finishes making whatever format changes they have in mind (they gave a date
of Oct. 31; I don't know if that's a hard deadline, but I have to assume it
is). The HD-PVRs of course will still work, but the set-top boxes they
depend on will no longer be usable, and the replacement boxes Comcast
offers will likely not work.

For the present, I can most likely keep my MythTV system going for a few
more years by switching to a CableCard-based tuner, so that's my immediate
plan. I don't get any premium channels so I don't care that those are not
available this way, but I understand that channels may start gradually
becoming unavailable to this tuner, so I will have a crappy Comcast DVR box
to catch those (at least the new crappy DVR looks to be considerably better
than the old crappy DVR, but of course it will never have 8TB of storage or
instant commercial skip). If enough channels that I watch regularly become
unavailable, then that will be when my MythTV system will be declared dead
and I'll have to get another set-top box for the basement TV and rely just
on Comcast DVR.

This depressing picture holds unless the laws change radically in this
country (USA), but since the MPAA owns our politicians, it seems unlikely
to change in my lifetime. For now I have ordered an HDHomerun Prime and a
USB 3.0 NIC. I realize a dedicated NIC isn't really required, but I have no
free ports on the basement switch where the backend lives and I have
problems with my current HDHomerun tuner producing unwatchable recordings
about half the time (OTA). This could be due to packet loss (seems unlikely
since all my network switches are gigabit, but they are also crappy
consumer-grade Netgear switches), bad reception (I have no way to tell if
that is happening), or maybe the HDHR power supply (these are infamous but
I'm pretty sure I've already replaced it once). At any rate this is a pain
to diagnose, and a USB NIC is cheaper than buying a switch with more ports,
and using a dedicated NIC at least eliminates one possible cause of issues
for a networked tuner.

--Greg
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