It's seems there's been a lot of questions from potential cablecard users wondering whether their local cable provider offers channels in Copy Free mode, and which channels they do so for. I thought it might be handy to build a database of this sort of info so that users could look online and get a more concrete sense of which cable providers are doing what, and if they're lucky, maybe even find an actual user report from their area.<br>
<br>Yesterday I was building a script for another myth user. His friend had a ceton card, and he was considering getting one too but wanted to know a full summary of which channels would be available to him in myth. I offered to put a script together for him so his friend could run it to gather all of that info. Then it occurred to me that, since I was already doing all the work of collecting the data, it would be trivial to have it post all of the details to a web page which would store it in a database so other users could see the results. So I did exactly that.<br>
<br>The script collects basic info for each channel: channel number, callsign, frequency, modulation, mpeg program number, and the CCI status. It also asks the user to supply the name of their cable provider, city, state, and zip code. All user provided details are optional, but obviously the results are more useful if you fill in this info. The info is otherwise anonymous (no usernames, IP addresses, or anything of the sort collected). <br>
<br>This script only works for Ceton InfiniTV 4 cards, but I tried to make the online part generic enough that when the HDHomerun Prime is released, someone could write a script that gathers all of the info from it and submit the details to the existing script. If someone wants to do that, please contact me before just going off and submitting your data to me, as I'd like to work with you to test that you are submitting valid data (and also to coordinate development...we probably don't need 10 people writing 10 versions of the same script).<br>
<br>Anyone with a Ceton InfiniTV 4 card can get the script from here:<br><a href="http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/0.24/index.html#CetonCCIScanner">http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/0.24/index.html#CetonCCIScanner</a><br><br>
And the online database can be found here:<br><a href="http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/cci/index.php">http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/cci/index.php</a><br><br>The website is very basic. If we get enough user participation, I could expand it to allow searching/filtering and pretty it up. Other suggestions are welcome.<br>
<br>Before you run the script, you'll want to change the ceton's ip address if you aren't running with the default IP. Also, this script just grabs tuner 4 and changes settings at will to gather the data, so please make sure you won't have anything else trying to use tuner 4 for the next hour or so. The script takes about 30 minutes for me to run and check 300+ channels (it needs to check every channel offered by your cable company, even if you don't subscribe to it, since there's no way to know which channels you subscribe to other than to test each one).<br>
<br>-- <br>Ron Frazier <br>