[mythtv-users] Possibilities of building a pci based card to work with cable provider's cable cards?

[Joe Votour]

As I understand it (I haven't read the CableCard spec
because I'm not in the cable industry anymore), it is
not a PCMCIA card, but rather has the same connector. 
That in itself just means that while you can use the
same connector slot, you'd have to run the traces
differently.

In theory it's possible to design such a card, in
reality, it might be a bit more difficult.  Once
you've reverse engineered what all of the signals do,
and then figure out what to route them to (I'd say
that for MythTV, the best bet is to send the
unencrypted signal to the CPU so that MythTV can have
an unencrypted signal to work with), then you'd still
be looking at a minimum of a few thousand dollars for
board fabrication.

This is actually a project I wouldn't mind working on
myself, but, alas, I cannot.  The reason is that this
would likely come up under the DMCA (in the United
States anyway), and as a work permit holder with a
Green Card application in process, I can't do anything
to jeopardize that.

However, I'm sure that there's some CableCard
documents available from CableLabs (possibly available
for download from opencable.com), you could start
there.

-- Joe

--- Matt Mousseau <matt at amsvans.com> wrote:

> With the new cable cards that the various cable
> providers are starting
> to provide, I'm curious about the possibility of
> building a Tuner Card
> that would accept a cable card (I think they're just
> pcmia cards?) and
> thus be able to receive whatever channels you were
> subscribed to,
> digitally.
>  
> Anyone have input? I think this is something I could
> build, just curious
> if I'm missing something obvious :-/
>  
> Matthew Mousseau
> AMSVans, Inc. Webmaster
> matt at amsvans.com
>  
> > _______________________________________________
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> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> 



		
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