[mythtv-users] Determine HD Homerun Prime usefulness

[Greg Woods]

On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 12:12 -0600, Tom Hayward wrote:

> 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)

You're right, I wasn't counting anything SD. Mostly because I did spend
money to buy HD TV's for both the main TV room and the upstairs, so I
really don't care about SD. I have already marked off all the SD
channels in my Schedules Direct lineups for which an HD equivalent is
available; I only use SD for things like government and public access
channels, which are SD-only. Those might well be copy-freely. I should
have thought that perhaps not everyone thinks the same way about
this :-) I do know that I can't receive even SD channels without some
kind of converter box, but some of them might be available to a cable
card-based device.


> 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.

That can be an option for some people, but generally the channels that
are not copy-freely are going to be encrypted over firewire as well. I
personally have never succeeded in getting firewire recording to work,
although I have seen others on this list report good success with it. It
probably depends on what firewire chip you have and what set-top box you
have. It has, however, always been reliable for channel changing for me.

I think the bottom line is that checking the copy flag directly on the
channels you care about, on your local cable system, is really the only
way to know what you could get with the HDHR Prime. It can vary a lot
even in the same general area (Ft. Collins vs. Louisville vs. Denver).

--Greg