CableCARD tuner support for MediaPortal 1 (6 Viewers)

[Tsaukpaetra]

I was very excited to find this thread! I am a software developer with only a little experience with MediaPortal, but I have experience with BDA and PBDA developing with another application (dvbe4sage extender for SageTV).

That would be wonderful! I'm dabbling around trying to get stuff to just compile and run correctly, more heads on the problem would be great!

So far, what seems to have been accomplished was that the Tuner part was recognized as a "Network" tuner, and I'm assuming controlled that way. Actually, this would make sense, as both the Ceton and HDHomerunPrime are network-enabled tuners after all.

 

[Sebastiii]

I think it's include for TVE35, but it's an WIP branch

I'm still trying to get things to work. I think I managed to select the branch entitled "EXP-TVE3.5_SEB_MERGE_Testing_Only", but so far I have no idea why Visual Studio refuses to open anything related to the TV server.... Oh well. Slow progress is still progress, right?

I can try to supply you an installer for testing

 

[FreakyJ]

As far as I know the Cablecard stuff isn't in the TVE3.5 branch... but I'm only 80% sure

 

[CodeMonkey]

I was very excited to find this thread! I am a software developer with only a little experience with MediaPortal, but I have experience with BDA and PBDA developing with another application (dvbe4sage extender for SageTV).

That would be wonderful! I'm dabbling around trying to get stuff to just compile and run correctly, more heads on the problem would be great!

So far, what seems to have been accomplished was that the Tuner part was recognized as a "Network" tuner, and I'm assuming controlled that way. Actually, this would make sense, as both the Ceton and HDHomerunPrime are network-enabled tuners after all.

I was assuming based on what I have read here that this work was done using PBDA and the cards drivers would deal with how the tuner was connected, network or USB or internal or whatever. I am also puzzled why 32 or 64 bit would matter for something like this. I would also assume that PBDA would see this as a DVB-C tuner which does require somewhat different setup in the software than DVB-T or DVB-S. This investigation and work has been done for dvbe4sage already. It is open source as well if you want to have a look at it (http://code.google.com/p/dvbe4sage/), it could prove useful as reference material.

Is EXP-TVE3.5_SEB_MERGE_Testing_Only the branch that mm's code is in for this?

 

[FreakyJ]

Is EXP-TVE3.5_SEB_MERGE_Testing_Only the branch that mm's code is in for this?

As far as I know mm never published the code, but I could be wrong. So if he published the code than it should be in there... there are no other branches where it could be else...

 

[CodeMonkey]

I'm thinking about the Ceton InfiniTV 4 USB instead of the hdhomerun prime now. I prefer to simply connect it to my tvserver PC than have it waste network bandwidth.

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

connect it to my tvserver PC than have it waste network bandwidth.

It's not that much wasted bandwidth. For example, in the working analog tuner, a standard channel takes up 6 MBit/s transmitting over the network in MediaPortal, over 802.11b it works just fine!

 

[CodeMonkey]

I sent an email to Ceton tech support asking if there was any kind of SDK or developer information for their InfiniTV cards and after a couple of exchanges it seems they use a Microsoft DRM and implied that we would not be able to get usable video from the card without it, even for subscribed channels. Claimed that Media Center was the only "authorized" Windows application.

I know basically nothing about that DRM (PlayReady he called it). But from their tech support person:

One thing InfiniTV does on our chip is de-crypt/re-encrypt the content and transcribe the proprietary DRM into PlayReady. That way the content is never “in the clear” and all digital rights are preserved, which is a requirement from the cable companies. MediaPortal would have to be able to do something similar in order to be compliant with CableCARD.

Does anyone have one of these cards and were they able to get it working with any Windows applications?
Or the hdhomerun prime for that matter?

 

[twemperor]

I sent an email to Ceton tech support asking if there was any kind of SDK or developer information for their InfiniTV cards and after a couple of exchanges it seems they use a Microsoft DRM and implied that we would not be able to get usable video from the card without it, even for subscribed channels. Claimed that Media Center was the only "authorized" Windows application.

I know basically nothing about that DRM (PlayReady he called it). But from their tech support person:

One thing InfiniTV does on our chip is de-crypt/re-encrypt the content and transcribe the proprietary DRM into PlayReady. That way the content is never “in the clear” and all digital rights are preserved, which is a requirement from the cable companies. MediaPortal would have to be able to do something similar in order to be compliant with CableCARD.

Does anyone have one of these cards and were they able to get it working with any Windows applications?
Or the hdhomerun prime for that matter?

I have a Ceton InfiniTV PCIe card, and using MP 1.3 Alpha with MM's patch from the first post works great! I did have to initialize the card using Windows Media Center first (otherwise I had odd issues), but now i use MediaPortal exclusively and the Ceton InfiniTV is completely rock-solid.

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

I have a Ceton InfiniTV PCIe card, and using MP 1.3 Beta with MM's patch from the first post works great!

I have been thinking I should try downgrading for this very reason, since I know mine works fine but the communication just isn't happening in the official builds. I think the major thing that gets lost is the ability to colorize guide listings, but that's not too important overall, right?