I've just bought all the hardware needed (I think) to build a MythTV box to the be center of my home entertainment system. I've worked with Linux for a while now but I've never taken the time to mess with digital stuff so I have a basic question. Do I need a separate capture card to be able to pick up and record digital cable? My cable provider is OTelco and I have the basic cable plus digital cable package. With all my hardware set up I am able to pick up all the basic cable channels (2-73) but none of the digital cable channels (200-900) will come in.

Now I asked in the forum here a couple days ago why I couldn't pick up any of the higher channels and got two very different responses. One reply was that all I needed to do was connect the outputs of the STB from my cable provider, to the inputs on my capture card (Hauppauge PVR-500). I did that but all I got was static and dark lines on the screen. The next reply to my post was that the first reply was crazy, the PVR-500 is an analogue receiver and you can't pick up digital cable channels with such a card, apparently you have to have another card.

I have the following hardware:

ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200 processor
Ultra V Series 500W power supply
512MB Kingston memory
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE tuner
NVidia GeForce FX 6600 video card
Seagate Ultra ATA100 300GB HD
Snapstream Firefly Remote that I hope to get working

Please someone tell me what I need to do to pick up and record all the channels that I pay for. If I need a separate card, what is recommended?

Thank you,

Tim

Your cable company encrypts the digital channels - There is no tuner card that I am aware of that will decrypt those, you are required to use their STB (set-top box)

If you are referring to http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13599&highlight=digital+stb, i think you misread the responses. ryanpatterson noted what i have already said above, that an analogue tuner can't tune digital channels, even if the cable company didn't encrypt them.

I suspect you'll need to do some more research before this really makes sense. Searching for "digital STB" on these forums should result in many hits, "MythTV digital cable" in Google will get you an overwhelming number of hits. You may want to start here: http://www.htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1932 because it will give you an overview without being too specific, but be sure to look through many of the Google hits. Then you'll be ready to get into the specifics of how to make your STB work with your KM box...

I just scanned the web page you suggested I read and that looks like exactly what I need. I'll go read that and then search the keywords you suggested. I can't wait to get this working, MythTV is awesome. I really like what I've seen so far.

I'll update my post with progress.

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Tim

to get the digital channels you need to use the tuner on STB.

You'll need to use an IRBlaster to allow your mythbox to change the channels on the STB. you need to feed the outpot of the STB into your capture card.

there are several config steps you need to do to get all of this working.

search for irblaster, digital cable

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA