Okay I have digital cable, and I have 2 Digital cable boxes, they are both motorola. How can I get all the digital channels working and be able to record off both boxes and their digital channels the ones above 125?


any help would be appreiacted?

If I understand your question correctly, you have 2 cable boxes off one cable, and want to decode two channels at the same time.

The simplest way is to get a cable splitter (a few bucks at a local electronics store) to split the cable before it hits the decoding boxes. That way your two cable decoders will have access to the entire spectrum.

However, I'm not sure what your cable vendor does with this sort of setup. I only have one decoder, and I know my cable-provider can interact with it through the digital signal... That might imply that you have to talk to them about supporting two decoders on the same cable. I don't know.

I think you missed the point I'm guessing he's talking about how to do it with knoppmyth. you would still need two tuner cards or at least two video inputs of some sort. The big problem is going to be getting myth to be able to change the channel on both digital boxes at the same time. I haven't a clue about how to do this or if it is even possible.

So most people with myth use analog cable?

There has to be somepeople taking advantage of all the 300+ channels that digital cable offer.

well I use analog cable. I know people use digital cable, but I don't think they use multiple boxes. I'm sure someones tried it and quite posibly figured it out, but the problem is since you are not using the tuner on the tv tuner card to tune the channels you have to send channel change signals to the cable boxes somehow. With one box this can be done one of two ways. you can use what is called an irblaster, or on some cable boxes you can use a serial cable to connect to them. The thing I don't know is if you can control two irblasters or the serial connections for that matter seperately and effectively control both digital cable boxes. I know several people have set up one digital one analog. still in this situation you run into problems since both signals can handle the lower channels while only one can handle the upper channels therefore if for some reason the digital box starts recording first on the lower channel then you want to record on the upper channel you can't. There are several discussions about this topic on the mythtv mailing list. And there very well may be discussion on using two digital boxes I just don't remember it, but I usually just quick scanned the messages when I was on the list.

The searchable archive is here.

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/archive/MythTV_C2/Users_F11/

Yeah Im on that mailing list, somewhat useless, forums are so much easier to get info, plus everytime I ask someone there I get no reply :-/

I too am interested in getting knoppmyth (mythtv) to use my digital cable signal. I would soooo much rather just cap whatever I want from the digital feed and play it back later. I have a PVR-250 on my analog line now, but as I understand it, the WinTV-D card does not work with mythtv...

is anyone out there capping digital cable?
If so, what hardware are you using?

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

well actually the wintv-d card won't get digital cable. it's for ota digital broadcasts, at least that's the way I understand it. You can definately use mythtv with your digital cable box. I am just not sure if you can use it with two digital cable boxes.

I'm a little confused about this setup...

Should I take the digital cable box and hook it directly into the myth box (in my case a PVR-250)? How does changing the channels work? How can I access channels >125?

Thanks!

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

yes you connect the digital cable into your tv card you can use the tuner or svid input if your cable box supports that. Changing the channels is the tricky part. basically what you are going to do is set your tuner card in the pc to channel 3 or 4 or whatever just like you do your tv. then you will use either an irblaster or a serial cable to allow the pc to change the channel on the cable box. This is just a basic how it works you would have to do some searching to find out how to impliment this. I have never done this, but I know it can be done.

Thanks for the info... if others are interested I unearthed this thread from the MythTV-users forum.

I have that moto box so I'm very interested in giving this a shot!

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Yes, you don't need two cable boxes.
I've hooked up my digital cable decoder directly to the cable, and take that output and plug it into my PVR tuner card.
Then I use a serial cable connector to run a changechannel.sh script to control the cable box.

It's very nice.

yes, but can you record two shows on different channels simotaniously? I think this is what the origional poster was looking to do.

My cable company did something to the digital box that prevents a serial cable from controlling the channel changing functions. if I wanna do this, looks like an IR blaster is what will be required. I don't know if it's worth it....

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

You can always build one...

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!