if you have a stb and a firewire port might as well. Although firewire has its issues some people have great success. If i had both i would try it.<br><br>Mitchell<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/10/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">
David Frascone</b> <<a href="mailto:dave@frascone.com">dave@frascone.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Rod Smith wrote:<br>> On Tuesday 10 April 2007 15:02, David Frascone wrote:<br>><br>>> Ok, after reading quite a bit, and searching quite a bit, I have come to<br>>> a few conclusions:<br>>><br>>> There is no Cable Card hardware for MythTV to use, so getting to
<br>>> Comcast's HD and premium channels is not possible with a tuner card.<br>>><br>>> But -- what about using a STB and blasting IR?<br>>><br>><br>> This will work, but with some important caveats:
<br>><br>> - IR blaster configurations sometimes don't work, so you might miss some<br>> recordings. How often depends on a lot of hardware and software details,<br>> and even ambient light conditions.
<br>><br>> - You'll be able to record the NTSC output of the STB. This means no HD<br>> content and even SD digital content will go from digital to analog and<br>> back to digital, which will degrade its quality.
<br>><br>><br>>> So, the receiver needs to be at least a dual-tuner setup, and needs to<br>>> record HD.<br>>><br>>> Is this possible? I'm guessing there is a way to blast IR to two (or<br>
>> more) Set Top Boxes, and to capture the output of the HD Comcast Set Top<br>>> Boxes via component, HDMI, etc.<br>>><br>><br>> AFAIK, there's no way to capture the HD output of HD STBs on consumer-grade
<br>> hardware. Some STBs do have firewire output for digital capture, but my<br>> understanding is that this works only with unencrypted content, so you'd do<br>> as well with a suitable direct HD capture device (bypassing the STB), such as
<br>> an HDHomerun (dual-tuner Ethernet device) or AVerMedia AVerTVHD A180<br>> (single-tuner PCI card). Such devices capture unencrypted HD content. If you<br>> go this route, be sure to get something with QAM support, which is the
<br>> encoding method used for digital channels by cable TV operators in the US.<br>><br>> The big question is how much content your cable provider encrypts. If you can<br>> tune HD channels directly on a non-CableCard TV, then you should be able to
<br>> record it with MythTV and a suitable HD capture device, or perhaps using a<br>> cable box's Firewire output. If not, then you'll only be able to capture an<br>> SD (NTSC) version of the content using an analog (NTSC) capture device,
<br>> assuming your HD STB has NTSC output at all.<br>><br>> If your provider doesn't encrypt the channels you care about, I'd suggest you<br>> get a mix of digital and analog/NTSC tuners. (Some can do both.) You'll be
<br>> able to record a lot of stuff without an STB, but most providers do encrypt<br>> at least some channels, so you may have to rent at least one STB and record<br>> some content via it. You might end up with something like an analog/NTSC
<br>> tuner recording directly, another analog/NTSC tuner recording via the STB,<br>> and a digital tuner recording directly.<br>><br>><br>Two last (I hope) questions:<br><br>1) What is the most popular tuner for analog & digital? (Popular for
<br>price / performance, features, and reliability)<br>2) In regard to firewire -- how does that work? Does it just constantly<br>transmit what's playing? So mythTV would change channels on the STB,<br>and then store the stream to disk? If so, shouldn't I do this before
<br>even buying a tuner card?<br><br>-Dave<br>_______________________________________________<br>mythtv-users mailing list<br><a href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">mythtv-users@mythtv.org</a><br><a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users">
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users</a><br></blockquote></div><br>