On Wednesday 16 February 2005 1:42, Kevin Pratt wrote: > Its not readily clear to me, but I'm guessing the basic channels > (SciFi, > Comedy Central, History, ...) are not encrypted (just the QAM), and I > can > capture these fine with the Air2PC. Is this a reasonable assumption?
No. It's entirely dependent on your cable provider. Per FCC regulation they are required to provide unencrypted streams for your local broadcast stations. Anything else is entirely up to them; some folks have reported that their cable co. doesn't encrypt anything other than premium & pay-per-view; other folks only get local broadcast stations unencrypted, and still others have everything encrypted (in violation of FCC regs). And don't forget, your cable company can change what they encrypt at any time, since they can just push a firmware upgrade out to all the STBs. > > I read somewhere (don't remember where unfortunately) that all the > Digital > Cable really gets me is the program guide, and that the shows are no > different than normal. This would imply that I could split the PVR > cable > line before the cable box and simplify channel switching for the tuner > card > (and since Myth gets its own EPG for programming, if it doesn't bother > anyone else, we really don't get anything extra from the charter > digital > box). Well, that's not quite correct... what you get from digital cable is digital programming. Also, you typically won't (can't?) get any HD channels over analog cable. The programs are transmitted as MPEG-2 streams, so there's no need to encode them yourself (if you can get access to the unencrypted stream). No need to worry about signal quality, etc. Now, with some providers that still support both analog & digital cable, you can still access the analog channels (1 - 125) directly over the cable with a regular tuner card. However, some providers are going 'all digital' and turning off the analog feeds. The best way to check would be to see if your TV can tune channels 1 thru 125 directly over the cable without a STB. So: - you *might* be able to tune analog channels 1-125 without a STB - you *might* be able to get unencrypted access to *some* digital channels with an Air2PC card (or pcHDTV 3000 when QAM support is stable in the driver) - you *might* be able to get unencrypted access to *some* digital channels over FireWire *if* your STB has an enabled FireWire port (which the cable co. must provide if you ask for it, per FCC regs) Currently, the only sure-fire way to be able to access *all* of your channels in Myth is to use the STB to tune, decode & decrypt the content, and record it with a regular tuner card over composite or S-Video out from the STB. HTH, JAC _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
