On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 12:39:27PM -0600, Nathan Nelson wrote: > I am considering a group of services for television, but want to order > one that will work with MythTV. Currently, I have Dish TV, but it's a > little limited as to how I get it working. I'm looking into Comcast, > Mstar, and some others. > > If anyone has MythTV working, who do you use as your cable or > satellite service? Any success with Dish?
If I were to attempt dish/direct TV I would personally look at getting a set top box that they provide that you can have it send unencryptd streams over the firewire and have myth dump those to disk. There are a handful of set top boxes that myth supports that do this. The main benefit is it does the decryption so you should be able to get all channels. The downside is sometimes the boxes can take a little pushing on your part and pointing them to FCC articles stating by law they have to provide one. Sometimes they require you to pay a $5-$10 "pvr" fee a month because the only boxes they provide that do this are their pvr models (you don't have to use their pvr functionlity, just the firewire port on them). I'd suggest looking at the mythtv forums and wiki's on this as what works changes monthly and I'm out of date on models. Free OTA recording will always be easier than trying to get all the channels on a service you have to pay for. There are legal cases and federal commities reviewing rules to force companies to provide smart cards or apply to open standards for encrypting so you can use generic hardware with a key they provide when you go with their service or any service, but it may be years if we ever see generic set top boxes (and tv tuners) that work with all services. --Brandon /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
