PVR and Fedora

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Chris Moore wrote:

> Does anyone know what channels I can record, ie digital and analog, if I set 
> up a Fedora box as a PVR. I have digital cable with 'Brighthouse' and am 
> wondering if I can record the digital channels, HBO and Cinemax for instance, 
> with MythTV without actually having the particular channel being outputted 
> from my cable box. If I record one of the digital channels but still have to 
> have the cable box tunned to that channel isn't that just video capture at 
> that point? The overall question is, can I get a Fedora box to act like TiVo 
> and record any channel that I subscribe to without having the cable box tuned 
> to that paticular channel? Do I need a digital TV tuner card? Don't know if 
> I'm missing a key point here. Any help or insight appreciated.

Yeah the key point is your cable box holds the decryption keys for the 
digital channels and updates them periodically either bi-directionaly on 
your cable, or over a modem. your linux box has no way of aquiring them. 
There is a ongoing standards movement towards something called cablecard 
which will allow devices other than the manufacturer stb to do the 
decoding, it strikes me as unlikely that there a clear path to non 
proprietary linux pvr's through that though.

If you got a tivo it would come with a little ir dongle it would use to 
control your set-top-box, you can do the same with mythtv, but the tuning 
is actually done by the stb. and recording is of course done from an 
analog output since all off the digital outputs the stb might eventually 
have will have hdcp on them...

If you couldn't tell, I pretty much hate the cable tv industry...

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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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