[ale] [OT] A vent and whine - ignore with dignity

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2010-06-27 at 11:46 -0400, Byron Jeff wrote:
> Now of course they try to explain that this is for the customer's
> benefit.
> But that's a bunch of horsecrap. The only purpose in encrypting is to
> force
> everyone to attach a box to every device that uses the signal. They
> offer
> two absolutely crappy digital to analog freebies. But everything else
> has
> to be rented on a per month basis.
> 
> At that point in time I had 7 direct consumers of the analog signal, 4
> TVs
> and 3 Myth tuners. I had 2 boxes, then it expanded to 4 (for the TVs).
> 
> But at this point in time, the MythTV box is virtually (and for the
> moment
> due to a upgrade glitch literally) out of commission. 

Nearly all cable companies are transitioning to encrypted channels, for
a multitude of reasons.  For the most part, the reason is money:
large-scale channel feeds want the channels encrypted.

The solution is to not rely on "clearQAM" tuners, and instead get a
multituner card that can use a CableCARD (so that you don't need
Comcast's equipment to have tuners that work).

Check out this quad-core tuner:

  http://www.cetoncorp.com/products.php

I don't know if it is yet supported by MythTV, but if it isn't, I'm sure
that it won't be terribly long.  Having a device such as this will soon
be the only way to watch the encrypted channels on almost any cable
television provider in the USA.

As an aside---I don't know why CableCARD failed in things like
television sets.  I always thought it was a great idea to not have to
have the separate cable box, personally.  But, there is the chance that
they will make their way into homes anyway now, since you'll need them
to do things like use MythTV or Microsoft's equivalent, whatever that
is, on a PC.

	--- Mike