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Oh man..it isn't too late...go for it!!

You can drop the cable box...just do a myth project...

Seriously, the HDHomerun is a GREAT item, and works great. It works and is easy with the guides out there. I used Gentoo to set up my mythbox...and it was easy following the Silicon dust and Gentoo Wiki pages.

It works with OTA, and QAM...you can use the two tuners in it either split OTA and QAM, or both QAM or both OTA...great product. Give it a try, and bypass the cable box.

That and a fun thing I've found is...it picks up the channels used for OnDemand...fun to see what other people are watching at night....

Actually..isn't a problem...you just gotta have a pretty decent processor in your PC, if you wanna record 2 HD channels at once and view a 3rd at the same time. But, a tuner like the HDHomerun makes tuning and watching HDTV content on MythTV a BREEZE...it works great.

And another benefit...with the cable companies often remapping their HD content, many tv's out there, like my friends' Samsung ones...cannot tune in the cable co's unencrypted HD content, whereas I can by scanning with my HDHomerun...hell, I even found free channels where they run the On Demand stuff...is fun to watch what other people are watching on there....

You can use DVB-C capture cards to capture the digital encoding strait from a cable line, if the channel is not encrypted. Where I live, all of the over the air channels are broadcast digitally unencrypted over the cable line. Everything else is encrypted. I could still record the analog channels using a regular analog capture card.

MythTV has always supported live streaming over the network. Wireless might not be able to keep up, but a 100Mbps connection is way more than enough. If you want to capture digital channels, then the simplest option is the HDHomeRun
http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun

It is a network attached dual tuner box that will stream the broadcast MPEG-2 data over the network to MythTV. MythTV will then record the stream to disk and/or transmit it to whatever frontends you have.

(Note: MythTV is designed to exist in two parts, the backend which records and streams, and the frontend which decodes/displays. Typically these two parts run on the same computer, but you can have any number of frontends and backends all working together. I've read about organizations using multiple backends to record 10+ channels at one with dozens of frontends to watch. Think of something like a hotel.)

I just can't stand settop boxes. I've yet to have ever seen one from the cable company that is responsive or as capable as anything homebrewed. I loved my old tivo, but, I gotta say, newerones that I've seen...seem to be slower than the old ones?

In the past...I'd opted for just plain analog cable...just to avoid the stupid settop box, the extra fees, etc.

Let's also consider how locked the cable co's boxes are.

Since I've put together a couple of MythTV boxes, I do enjoy it. My last one may need a bit of a faster processor...I built this media box pre-katrina, and didn't really have much need for HD stuff. I now have it loaded with a Haupauge analog card...and have a HDHomerun dual tuner unit...one spliced into the cable feed and one into an antenna. The great thing is...I can set it up to record what I want, when I want..keep things as I want, backup to DVD if I please...timeshift and send it to every room i want. The only thing I can't do, is pay tv stations, and frankly, I've not see that many. I'd like to get the HD of Foodtv and some others, but, that's about it.

I'm not interested in recording things, and sending it out for free on a P2P system, I just want to use things for personal consumption, but, the cable co's won't let us do that. Until then, I'd do not want their set top box. They are slower than what I can do, they aren't as flexible (can't have more than 2 tuners in them usually), and they charge fees (one for each tv in the home?).

Does anyone out there in the US actually LIKE the set top boxes they have? Would you not rather have different choices?

I keep thinking, if they'd make it easier to buy 3rd party stuff (or DIY materials) that would allow YOU to get the content you pay for and use it as you please for private consumption, there's be less need for 'pirated' content to be out there, etc.

Let the consumer have more choice and charge a fair rate, and I think 98% of the people out there would have no problem with paying for content and hooking into their system.

You want an HDHomeRun, it will tune unencrypted (ClearQAM) channels and works with MythTV. Keep in mind however that cable companies usually encrypt all but the national networks, you won't get anything besides what you can already get with an antenna or infomercial/shopping networks that pay for their placement.

I don't understand people using tuner cards anymore. There is a much more elegant solution that "just works" and can keep the requirements on the system itself down:

http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun

I've been using this for about a year now to power my myth setup. I have a myth server in the basement and a frontend upstairs and aside from needing to isolate the network traffic from the frontend to the backend, it works swimmingly.

The nicer ones should even support unencrypted digital cable (QAM) tuning. My ethernet-connected HDHomeRun does.

Yes, ndiswrapper exists. However, if it's so reasonable to expect MS to provide a compatibility layer, where are the wrappers for other kinds of drivers? Where's the wrapper that lets me run my TV Tuner card in Linux?

Chances are there is no wrapper because the tuner is already supported natively by ivtv (for hardware-encoding MPEG-2 cards) or v4l (for framegrabber cards).

If your card isn't supported, blame the manufacturer and get a supported card instead. I recommend the Hauppage PVR-x50/500 series for SD and the HDHomerun for HD -- QAM or ATSC.

Show me equivalent *legal* sources of such content available *right now* in full OTA-quality HD. Didn't think so.

http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdhomerun

The HDHomeRun currently only works with free-to-air (ATSC) over-the-air, or un-encrypted QAM cable television.

You did want full OTA quality, right? And it is legal, as it's picking up radio signals over the air, right? Oh, it also doesn't encrypt the signal when it comes over the ethernet. You can watch it with VLC on your PC or one of several media servers/software packages out there.

Unfortunately, it's not just Microsoft. Cable and Satellite providers have things so locked down that doing what *I* want with the HD content I pay for is simply out of the question. I use an HDHomeRun box in conjunction with SageTV, which will let me record both OTA and clear QAM HD channels over cable, but the offerings are limited, and it's certainly NOT a system for Joe Sixpack. While it is nice to be able to watch and record HD content, unless it's clear (unencrypted) you are out of luck. Cable, DirecTV, and Dish all provide varying degrees of "premium" HD content, but unless you lock yourself into a their HD-DVRs, again, you are out of luck. And even if you do use an HD-DVR from cable or satellite companies, don't even think of offloading the content.

In the US, I don't believe there is any way to capture HD digital signals from satellite or cable (except for a locked-down set-top box) is there?

You can capture unencrypted QAM channels on your cable. All the network TV stations like ABC, NBC, FOX, PBS, etc are available in unencrypted QAM. In my area, even PPV content including pr0n is available! just buy this and use it with MythTV or MCE

With the HDHomeRun you can watch/record the unencrypted channels on digital cable:
http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun

Two tuners and plugs into your Ethernet network. You can watch content from any computer on your network.

Works with MCE 2005 and Vista MCE - both 32 and 64-bit versions.
Works with SageTV, BeyondTV, etc.
Works with MythTV under Linux.
Mac support is rumored to be coming soon.

Linux review:
http://servers.linux.com/servers/07/04/18/1531247. shtml?tid=117&tid=39

I never knew about the HDHomeRun until someone posted here it the other day. This was just what I was looking for, and I ordered one immediately. I thought it was a really good idea. I have an extensive MythTV setup, but what I plan to do with this box is locate it where the cable comes in, (near the TV) but locate the MythTV server much further away. This will allow more flexibility as to where the server goes by using the existing LAN and eliminating the long coax runs that feed cable to the tuner cards in the server.
I haven't received my unit yet, but if I were to speculate, I'd guess it is probably contains DVB style tuners with an Ethernet PHY for the interface instead of PCI. It is probably a design similar to (Warning, PDF) this but with two tuners and no Wireless Ethernet.

For watching unencrypted digital cable on a PC, take a look at the HDHomeRun:
http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun

Two tuners, works with MCE (2005, Vista, x86, x64), BeyondTV, SageTV, etc.
Linux - works with MythTV and VLC.
Mac support is rumored to be soon.

http://brentevans.blogspot.com/2007/03/silicondust -hdhomerun-qam-tuner-review.html
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/15312 47

HDHomeRun

Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.

It's a pretty brilliant little box.

Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.

Check out the HDHomeRun. http://www.silicondust.com/

It's not a card, it's an external box, that has two tuners and sits on your network. The beauty is, no worries about drivers, kernels, etc.
It can tune OTA and unencrypted QAM. That means, unencrypted cable. Can't do anything w/ satellite.

-Mark

I use both a MythTV DVR (64-bit Ubuntu) and a MCE DVR (64-bit Vista) at home. The MythTV machine is primary and the Vista machine is secondary.

The automatic commercial skip in MythTV is fantastic!
You watch TV shows and there are no adverts. Simple as that.

The biggest problem is resisting to urge to pick up the remote when the show is leading into an ad break :-)

Both machines can record ATSC HDTV and Digital Cable (QAM) - running a total of 4 digital tuners (2 x HDHomeRun network digital tuners with two tuner each - http://www.silicondust.com/)

May I also suggest:

pcHDTV HD-5500. $129 list. PCI. Coax input. Analog/digital tuner. Hardware MPEG encoder. Explicitly designed to work with Linux.

Silicondust HDHomeRun. $169 list. Stand-alone box. Ethernet attachment. Dual coax inputs. Dual analog/digital tuners. Hardware MPEG encoder. Can stream video to MythTV and other systems.

Jarod Wilson recommended these to our LUG. I got the HD-5500 and it works well.

Also, I am told that Hauppague has recently started packaging HVR-1600 cards in PVR-150 boxes, with no indication of the change. The HVR-1600 does NOT work with MythTV.

Just as a followup, I apparently quite underestimated the cost of a Slingbox -- for some reason I had this idea they were about $75 or so, when they're really about $125. That would buy you at least one, probably two, PVR-150s if you shopped around for them on sale. If you could write off the cost of the spare computer to run it on (i.e., you have a few sitting around, as I suspect many /.ers do) then you could probably beat the Slingbox in price, although unless you have a spare ultra-low-power system, eventually your cost advantage is going to get eaten up in electricity consumption.

The closest thing you can get to a Slingbox that will work well with MythTV is a box called the HDHomeRun, $170, which does ATSC OTA and QAM Cable HDTV, letting you record it on a suitably-powerful MythTV box.

On CableCard:

The problem with CableCard is that it's more inconvenient that the damn STB's. I'd rather have a separate box that I can move myself than have a card that a Cable Company installer has to come out and set up anytime I want to use it in a different device. It only screws things up. Not to mention the reduced functionality: STBs give you On Demand and interactive program guides. But the existing CableCard solutions will only give one-way communication, so you don't get those features. Vista, for all of its self-proclaimed greatness will only work with the one-way version.

The funny thing is, a lot of the point of CableCard is for these PVR's. Vista made such a big deal over CableCard support, since now you could finally record your HD programming that you already pay so much for, instead of just the OTA stuff. But woops -- you can't really record it (But we tricked into into buying a bunch of hardware for that purpose, didn't we!). It's insane. So far, you can only use CableCard with certified products like Media Center; Several high-end companies have sprung up selling high-end Media Center PC's, with a lot of the focus on the Cable Card support, so you spend several thousand dollars to be able to record any of the HD cable programming you paid for. And now, after you've jumped through the hoops and bought the "certified, hassle-free, and legal" solution, they still block you from doing what you paid for. And for what? To prevent piracy? Yeah right, all of those shows you can't record will still be available via bittorrent. Congratulations to the content providers, Cable Labs, and Microsoft. You just scammed the honest people in the name of fighting piracy, while completely losing the battle with the people who don't pay you anyway.

Now on MythTV:

The only hardware that really needs to be standardized is the tuner. And some tuners are supported remarkably easily. Hauppage cards are known for being a great fit with MythTV. I know mine works pretty easily. Also, check out the pcHDTV card for HD, which is made specifically for Linux, and is also supported very well under MythTV. And if you want something that's really easy to set up, try out the HDHomeRun. It's a simple network box that just streams the unencrypted OTA HD signal over Ethernet. MythTV knows all about it, so all you have to do to set it up is tell Myth that's what you're using, and type in the IP address. Also, there's two tuners, so it's a great deal.

It's not hard to find out which hardware is well-supported in MythTV. I've only heard good things about those three devices. You don't need a whole standardized platform. Just find a tuner that works well.

Oh, and the problem with the AppleTV box is that it's not a tuner so by itself, it's nothing like a TIVO. Saying that "the platform is cheap at least" isn't really true, since it's $300 just to stream content from your PC to your TV. It won't get any of the content for you, unless you buy it off the iTunes store, which still costs money for each show you get. You can pair it with something like EyeTV for a little more complete DVR experience, and that would probably work pretty well. But on its own, Apple hasn't made a DVR solution. I would bet they don't plan on doing it any time soon, either.

Look into silicondust's HDHomeRun. It's a small box with two OTA/QAM (digitalTV over cable) tuners and an ethernet port. It sends the video out via RTSP, and you connect to the box as though it's a streaming video source. There's a small included utility that changes channels for you from your remote computer and tunes to the signal using VLC.

In XP or Vista MCE, their drivers create a virtual "card" that does the same thing, only within the MCE interface. It's the only product I know of that enables QAM without a cablecard in MCE because MS never designed MCE to tune into the frequencies used by QAM.

SiliconDust's website looks like some pretty amateur-ish crap, but their hardware ($180) has performed well and does exactly what they say it will. Their tech support guys live in the forums and have been known to compile special version of firmware baed on people's particular complaints. It's a good product.

http://www.silicondust.com/

go read up. you need a pc (this isn't an end-user device that connects directly to a tv) but it DOES have atsc and clear-qam. meaning: off the air and also cable unencrypted.

seems to work, too. I love mine. 1 channel of HD takes 15% of a 10/100 ether. gig-e is not even close to needed, here, thankfully. (all the work is in PLAYBACK, not saving to disk, btw).

What are you talking about?

My Sony TiVo has a couple hundred hours of recording capacity thanks to a 2nd hard drive that I added to it. I first put my new harddrive in a desktop computer and booted from one of the Linux boot CDs (I forgot which one, I think Dylan's) to configure it, then slapped it in to my TiVo and it was instantly available.

Adding a hard drive isn't good enough to count as 'hacking' even when it is seamlessly accepted by the interface? Okay, then add an Ethernet card to a 1st generation TiVo. After TiVo released there v3 software you don't even need to install drivers anymore for the most popular of the ethernet addons. What? Yes, you heard me: TiVo added built-in support for hacking your TiVo to have ethernet - even though they didn't announce support for ethernet officially until the Series 2 TiVos came with an external USB port. (There is a version with a built in wireless card too, called the airnet)

I even have a Cache Card in my TiVo. Talk about hack... Not only does it add an ethernet port, but it lets me add 512 megs of ram to cache the TiVo databases (which were large and slow on a tivo upgraded with so much recording capacity).

My TiVo is happily chugging along as expected. It didn't even mind when I added a web server to it, so that I could schedule recordings and modify my to-do list when I'm at work, even though I don't have a Series 2 unit that has that feature built-in.

You might want to check out the TiVo Community Forum (in particular the Upgrade Center and Underground sections) to see what the TiVo community is all about. There are utilities to display caller id info on screen, random pictures, the weather, stock tickers, instant messenger messages, and more. Oh, and before you say TiVo doesn't 'embrace' this community, search the postings - it shouldn't be too hard to find some posts from employees there.

Now if by "doesn't embrace" you mean "lets people trade files with reckless abandon on the internet" then yes, you are right. Everyone on that site 'plays fair'. Threads about decrypting/extracting the video files, hacking subscription information so you don't have to pay to get schedule listing updates, etc aren't allowed. Why bite the hand that feeds you? If we were to do things that got TiVo in trouble they wouldn't keep making sweet hardware for us to love!

The only person at home who uses my home phone line is Tivo, everything else goes through the network connection or cell. So when a friend told me about some easy hardware mods, one of them is plug 'n go, I had to buy one. Check out 9th tee . They have a whole bunch of hardware upgrades for the Tivo including a wireless 802.11b ethernet card based on the prism chipset.

The ISA ethernet card is plug 'n go if you're using Tivo software 3.0.x or later and have a first gen Tivo. The 802.11b wireless card is not quite as easy to install, but 9th tee has links to instructions.

-Runz