I've had a stable knoppmyth setup for a few years now using a winTV 401 pci card from Hauppuage. My cable co. just informed me that they are switching to all digital signal in October though, which means (I think) that I need their digital box to switch channels. I don't see how this can work with my existing setup. Is anyone else up against this issue, or do you have a solution? Do I need to upgrade my tuner card? I'm not concerned with digital output, just want to keep recording and viewing with as little change or purchase as possible.

Thanks in advance....

You'll need an IR blaster or the like to control the box. A search on the forums or the wiki for "irblaster" should turn up a wealth of info.

Actually while you're at it, why not tell them that you want one of these nifty firewire ones that they're required to provide if you ask. A search of the forums should provide a link to the FCC chapter and verse that you can wave in their faces. If you're machine has enough horsepower and a firewire port you could get HDTV with no other outlay.

Thanks TJC,

What if I were to purchase an hd-5500 tuner card? Would that eliminate the need for the cable co.'s box? Or would I still need to set up the IR Blaster or firewire?

I would love to demand a firewire ir receiver from my cable company. I was unable to locate this detail in searching the forum though. Anyone out there know where it may be?

The digital cards only works for ATSC unencrypted QAM or OTA stuff which is generally a small subset. If you want to get the rest of the channels you pay for you need to control the box. Firewire is the best way available since it also gives you capture HDTV capture capabilities.

Search for posts in the DTV section, by Xsecrets, that mention firewire and fcc. That ought to get you a very short list.

Thanks again TJC,

I think I found the fcc post here http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4986 and would not have found it without knowing who made the post. So just to get things straight: I still need a serial IR receiver and IRBlaster, which will control both the knoppmyth interface and the cable co.'s box? Firewire is just for better capture of the signal, right?

Sorry, it takes things a little while to sink in sometimes.

You're supposed to be able to do control over the firewire too, which is part of the reason I suggested it. I'm pretty sure Xsecrets had a really good explaination in one of his firewire posts...

Many thanks, once again!

Ok, so here's the skinny on Firewire capture...

1) the Cable Co. is required to give you a cable box with a firewire port if you ask for one.
2) That said, they ARE NOT required to provide anything other than the basic "broadcast" locals unencrypted over the firewire port. MythTV (nor any other PC based recording solution available right now) will not decrypt the "5C" transport encryption or any other encryption that may be put on the signal coming out of the cable box. This is primarily intended to allow devices such as a DVHS recorder to be able to record the signal (as they support 5C link encryption). As an example, I am able to record Los Angeles local channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and KCET (PBS) over firewire. I am also able to record 902, 904, 907, 911, and 928 over firewire which are the local "HD" or "DT" variants of the aforementioned channels. I can also record a small number of other "locals". I cannot record any other channel as they are all transmitted with 5C encryption and my linux box won't decode it.
3) Firewire will control channel changing over the firewire connection.
4) Recording over firewire can be finicky. Reboots and cable box shutdown's can put your cable box on the wrong "node" so you won't be able to control or record from it (basically the device "address" changes sometimes when you disconnect and reconnect to the device). Hopefully a future version of Myth will allow the application to dynamically detect the Node and Port of connected devices to allow for more reliable connections. Fortunately I don't reboot much so I'm usually ok.
5) Recording via firewire takes a LOT of disk space. I'll have to do a bit of testing to confirm, but recording even analog channels over firewire takes as much disk space as recording a low bitrate HD stream.
6) Recording via firewire from the cable box takes over the cable box so that it cannot be used without affecting the recording. I don't believe that there are any 2 tuner cable boxes out there yet.

If I lived in an area of LA where I could receive Over the Air DT signals, I'd have a dvico card in my machine in a heartbeat. We have great channel availability, I just can't see any of the channels from my current location.

My current setup is:

PVR-250 + IRBlaster connected to standard digital cable box via SVideo
PVR-250 connected directly to analog cable.
Firewire connected to Motorola 6200

All sitting on 700GB of SATA disk in standard XFS format using myth_archive_job.pl to move files around (no LVM or RAID arrays here... I had a filesystem go corrupt on me when I had a SATA card and motherboard go bad. Lost 460GB of recordings... Had a bad effect on WAF.)

Hope all that info helps...

I just wanted to thank you for all this good info. I am sure that one day I will also have to do this. Do you know of a how-to or a wiki that takes someone through setting this up type of thing up step by step?

Matt K



[quote="MisoSoup777"]Ok, so here's the skinny on Firewire capture...

1) the Cable Co. is required to give you a cable box with a firewire port if you ask for one.
2) That said, they ARE NOT required to provide anything other than the basic "broadcast" locals unencrypted over the firewire port. MythTV (nor any other PC based recording solution available right now) will not decrypt the "5C" transport encryption or any other encryption that may be put on the signal coming out of the cable box. This is primarily intended to allow devices such as a DVHS recorder to be able to record the signal (as they support 5C link encryption). As an example, I am able to record Los Angeles local channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and KCET (PBS) over firewire. I am also able to record 902, 904, 907, 911, and 928 over firewire which are the local "HD" or "DT" variants of the aforementioned channels. I can also record a small number of other "locals". I cannot record any other channel as they are all transmitted with 5C encryption and my linux box won't decode it.
3) Firewire will control channel changing over the firewire connection.
4) Recording over firewire can be finicky. Reboots and cable box shutdown's can put your cable box on the wrong "node" so you won't be able to control or record from it (basically the device "address" changes sometimes when you disconnect and reconnect to the device). Hopefully a future version of Myth will allow the application to dynamically detect the Node and Port of connected devices to allow for more reliable connections. Fortunately I don't reboot much so I'm usually ok.
5) Recording via firewire takes a LOT of disk space. I'll have to do a bit of testing to confirm, but recording even analog channels over firewire takes as much disk space as recording a low bitrate HD stream.
6) Recording via firewire from the cable box takes over the cable box so that it cannot be used without affecting the recording. I don't believe that there are any 2 tuner cable boxes out there yet.

If I lived in an area of LA where I could receive Over the Air DT signals, I'd have a dvico card in my machine in a heartbeat. We have great channel availability, I just can't see any of the channels from my current location.

My current setup is:

PVR-250 + IRBlaster connected to standard digital cable box via SVideo
PVR-250 connected directly to analog cable.
Firewire connected to Motorola 6200

All sitting on 700GB of SATA disk in standard XFS format using myth_archive_job.pl to move files around (no LVM or RAID arrays here... I had a filesystem go corrupt on me when I had a SATA card and motherboard go bad. Lost 460GB of recordings... Had a bad effect on WAF.)

Hope all that info helps...

_________________
R5F1 : AMD 64 2800 : Nvidia 5200 : 2x PVR- 150