[mythtv-users] Building a database of cablecard encryption (CCI) details

[Ronald Frazier]

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.

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.

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).

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).

Anyone with a Ceton InfiniTV 4 card can get the script from here:
http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/0.24/index.html#CetonCCIScanner

And the online database can be found here:
http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/cci/index.php

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.

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).

-- 
Ron Frazier
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