[mythtv-users] My 15 year anniversary

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 12:56 PM Tom Bishop <bishoptf at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have 2 prime units and use charter/spectrum, when you rented the cable cards they should have provided tuner adapters, need one for each unit. I've been setup and using this for years with no issues.

Depending on market and the channels in the package
you subscribe to, you may not need a TA/TR.  *However*,
(again, depending on market/package) Charter has been
moving more channels to SDV which requires a TA/TR
in order to shuffle their bandwidth (mostly to avoid doing
the very very expensive plant work for the alternatives),
so even if you don't have a TA/TR today, you *might*
need one tomorrow.

However, the premium channels in almost all markets
require a protected content path, which MythTV cannot
provide (so HBO is usually not direct available to MythTV
when using a CableCARD OCUR tuner).  And in
L-TWC markets, almost all content other than the
locals (and PEGs) are also marked as requiring a
protected content path.  That is why in many L-TWC
markets using a STB and the analogue "hole" with
a HDPVR is the primary option.

Note that (new) Charter has L-Charter, L-TWC, and L-BHN
(the L standing for Legacy) markets, each of which have
their own particularities, and are only slowly (very slowly,
probably take close to another decade) moving to be
consistent.  So when one says Charter (or Spectrum),
the legacy company is important for others to determine
if the experience is likely relevant.

Lastly, the last two times clients picked up a CableCARD
in a L-TWC franchise, the CSR did *not* provide a TA/TR.
In both cases, based on the package they had, I actually
recommended that they not go back and get one,
because none of their channels were (or could be)
SDV'd(*), but also because getting a TA/TR to operate
can be a real PITA (a lot of pain with no gain for them).
FWIW, both those clients had TiVos rather than using
MythTV, but the requirements for TA/TR are the same.



(*) In those cases the clients had basic packages, and
because this was a L-TWC location, L-TWC had been
using HD-DTAs for some clients with those packages,
and as the HD-DTAs cannot work with a TA/TR, those
channels could not be SDV'd.