[mythtv-users] Determine HD Homerun Prime usefulness

[Tom Hayward]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Greg Woods <greg at gregandeva.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 03:11 -0400, Carl Johnson wrote:
>> for mythtv...if it's anything other than 0x00, you're hosed.
>
> I live in Louisville (CO) and have Comcast. They now encrypt pretty much
> everything except a few locals that I can already get with an antenna.
> There's a chance it might be different in Denver than it is here, but
> prepare to be disappointed. The only thing that works here is an HD-PVR,
> which records the component output of the set-top box, and of course
> still requires you to rent a set-top box. Comcast pretty much sucks, but
> the situation would be no better with satellite. Most Comcast set-top
> boxes at least allow channel changes via firewire, which for me at least
> has been far easier and more reliable than using an IR blaster (which
> has never worked on my system due to a "quirky USB chip", which
> basically means that the Linux driver doesn't work with it because
> something is implemented in a nonstandard way)

Wow, depressing news from Louisville. Up here in Fort Collins, Comcast
encrypts everything except the locals and a few SD channels, but the
Prime and CableCard have no problems decrypting it. Everything in my
package ("Digital Starter", I think) is CCI 0x00, so it works with
MythTV. When I first subscribed, I had a free trial of HBO. I couldn't
record HBO--IIRC it was CCI Copy Once.

Summary for what I get with Comcast in Fort Collins:
~80 channels via ClearQAM with HDHomeRun Dual (locals and SD--mostly
local access, CSPAN, other boring stuff)
~120 additional channels via Encrypted QAM with HD HomeRun Prime +
CableCard (all standard cable networks)
Premium (movie) channels are marked Copy Once and only work under
Windows Media Center, Tivo, etc.

By the way, before I got the Prime, I was grabbing the MPEG stream via
Firewire from the STB for all the same channels. No HD-PVR/re-encoding
needed.

Tom