[mythtv-users] HDHR Prime in QAM Mode

[Greg Woods]

On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 09:45 -0400, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>  the cable companies
> have been pushing to eliminate clear QAM

...and, from what I hear, they have largely succeeded. The Comcast tech
who was at my house fixing a backfeed interference problem told me that
Comcast won some court case so that they will now be free to encrypt
everything HD, even the broadcast stations, and that they were going to
do so within a month (at least in my area). That will make it impossible
to get anything HD without a set top box. I've already hooked up one of
my HDHR tuners to the antenna I hadn't gotten around to using yet to
provide that extra source of broadcast stations (mostly used during
football season). That will at least prevent the HDHR from being a
complete brick.

For what it's worth, I think the real reason the cable companies have
been pushing for this is so that they can force everyone to pay for more
set top boxes that they wouldn't otherwise need. From my point of view,
if clear QAM goes away, it is the last advantage that cable had over
satellite. I am going to at least take a look at DirectTV, Dish, and the
phone company offerings now. Biggest issue there is that I don't think
the STB's from these companies will do firewire channel changing, so
I'll probably have to get some kind of IR blaster going to do channel
changes, something that has not worked for me in the past because of
what one developer called a "quirky USB chip" (meaning, the Linux mceusb
driver doesn't work with my motherboard so I'm screwed until it comes
time to buy a whole new system).

--Greg