Does a MythTV-driven digital content capture card exist for use in Canada (Shaw)?

September 10, 2006 11:55 PM

Does a MythTV-driven digital content capture card exist for use in Canada (Shaw)?

I'm looking at different options for building a MythTV PVR, and ideally I'd like to be able to get digital channels for recording. I'm guessing this isn't possible since this would have to somehow be setup with the subscription service from my cable provider (Shaw), but just in case I thought I would ask the hive-mind. The best case would be to be able to subscribe to an ethnic channel my parents watch, and if not then to be able to pick up any non-subscription digital channels.

posted by ThinkNut to Technology (7 answers total)

Wouldn't you just plug the coax out from the cable box into a capture card and use an IR blaster to let myth change the channel?
posted by crypticgeek at 1:17 AM on September 11, 2006

Best answer: I was never able to find a capture card that worked with digital channels in Canada. The thing is, the card has to be able to decrypt the digital signal, which would require specialty software (or at the very least, specialty hardware, since I'm guessing all the algorithms are different per cable company). I can't see a company like Shaw (or Rogers, or Telus, or Cogeco) willingly providing something like that when it would mean losing out on cable-box revenue. And the Canadian cable market is much too small for hackers to bother with it.

I think the best you could do is crypticgeek's solution. Many capture cards come with an IR device that plugs into the capture card, and that attaches to the IR receiver on your cable box so that when the software wants to change the channel, it does so on the cable box instead of in the card's built-in tuner. It's not a bad solution, really, but it's not quite as elegant as a built in digital tuner solution.
posted by antifuse at 1:33 AM on September 11, 2006

At least in Europe, some digital cable TV cards come with a CAM slot for the smartcart that would otherwise be plugged into the cable box.

Canada may be completely different of course.
posted by pharm at 4:56 AM on September 11, 2006

Best answer: I currently run MythTV with Videotron digital cable. There are no tuners for it, so you must use an IR transmitter. It's not too hard to setup, I actually rewired mine (from a PVR-150 MCE kit) to plug in to my serial port so I could get lirc to work with it. I did not use coax connections, but rather the RCA outputs from the videotron box (an explorer 2200 I think). Better quality that way, I gather. Maybe you can also do svideo if your capture card can handle that. There's no point of using coax if you're not going to be using an integrated tuner.

It's certainly not a plug and play solution and required some work to get everything working correctly, but MythTV works fine for me now with this setup.
posted by splice at 5:36 AM on September 11, 2006

I'm going to be setting up a MythTV box in the next few months; one of the many reasons we just downgraded to basic analogue cable was that I couldn't find any hardware that could decode the digital cable signals in Canada (I'm with Cogeco), and the supplied decoder hardware is locked down.

I want to be able to do the "record one thing (or more), watch another channel" thing, and there's no point in spending more money on TV if I can't do that, channel selection be damned.

doesn't really help, it's true, but thought I'd share
posted by lowlife at 6:23 AM on September 11, 2006

If you get a Shaw HD box (Motorola DCT-6200), it has Firewire ports on it that you can pull digital video from, or so I've read. You can also change the channels via Firewire. The only caveat is that you can't get channels with the copy-protect flag set this way, since the box doesn't output them via Firewire.

Aside from that, I'd go with crypticgeek's suggestion, although I'd use the S-Video connector instead of coax for higher quality picture.
posted by pocams at 10:14 AM on September 11, 2006

pocams, where did you read you could change the channels through the firewire port? this was not my understanding, at least not on my DCT-3412 (Comcast).
posted by Dunwitty at 5:19 PM on September 12, 2006