[mythtv-users] Good card to buy for Comcast

[Scott Simpson]

On 01/01/2013 02:26 PM, Preston Crow wrote:
> Yup.  The best part is that unlike a QAM tuner, the cable card gets the
> logical channel map from your provider, so by the time MythTV sees it,
> everything is using the same channel numbers that you expect.  So if
> they move around the logical channels to different physical channels,
> you don't care.  (That was a problem for me about once a year in my
> experience.)
>
> You will need to get the cable card from your cable company. Verizon
> charges something like $4/month, but someone said Comcast gives out the
> first one free, though it may be different in different places.  You
> don't need to have them come out to install it.

Comcast gives the first one free. Subsequent ones are $1.20/month (cheap).

> The only downside is that you don't get any channels with restrictions.
> On many cable systems, all basic cable channels are encrypted, but
> flagged as "copy freely," so they work great, but premium channels
> generally have more restrictive flags and can't be recorded with open
> source software.

What is a premium channel? HBO or CNN? I want to be able to record CNN 
(which I get without paying) but I don't care about HBO.

I guess we could say you can't record premium channels UNLESS you record 
the output of your cable tuner box (which requires an IR blaster and 
which I'm not going to do).