Hello All,
I am doing all my research before I dive into my MythTV HD project (I am new
to Myth & Linux, and fairly new ot HD...so bare with me:). I am using a
digital cable box from Time Warner.
I understand that my cable stream is encrypted going into my cable box,
which requires me to use their box. But why can't cards like pcHDTV3000
read the component video coming out of my cable box. I know it whould need
to handle QAM for HD, but once that is done there is still the issue of
being encrypted by the cable company. How can that be encrypted, my TV
would have to know how to unencrypt it? Why can't I let the box do the
unencrypting and just take the signal before it hits the TV?
Is this because it is HD? Or digital? Wouldn't this work on just normal
analog cable, that did not need a cable box?
If you have digital cable, your digital channels come in over your cable as MPEG-2 in a QAM transport. A pcHDTV3000 is supposed to be able to tune/decode these channels once the upgraded driver/firmware is released. However, as you're aware, most of the channels are likely to be encrypted by your cable provider, thus negating (most of) the advantage of having that card.
The component video coming out of your cable box is raw video, not MPEG data. Your cable box has already done the work of decrypting and decoding the signal. Thus, it's now an analog signal and you need a regular capture card (bttv card, PVR-x50, etc) to capture it. Think about it... you suggest "taking the signal before it hits the TV", but your TV can't decode MPEG, so it's got to be raw video, neh?
What you want to do *may* be possible, as the FCC has required cable operators to provide an enabled FireWire port that you may use to capture the digital (MPEG) data that your cable box has decrypted (but not decoded). The catch is the content accessed via FireWire will not be HD... any HD content will have been transcoded down to a lower resolution (say, 480p). In any event, Myth does not currently support capturing video over FireWire.
HTH,
JAC
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