CableCard - US - Questions (1 Viewer)

[eyelobes]

I just made the switch from XBMC to MediaPortal this weekend and am kicking myself for not doing it earlier. I have gotten all of my movies, music, and tv shows imported successfully. I've gotten my my media scraped perfectly. I even have HD audio bitstreaming without a problem. Hulu Desktop, Netflix, and Bluray playback all work flawlessly from the homescreen.

I am about to give the TV server/client aspect a jump and need to know a couple of things.

I currently have knology - which uses a multistream cablecard. I bypassed the settop box and was able to pull about 69 channels just from the tv's internal tuner.

Will a NTSC/ATSC/ ClearQAM tuner card take all of those channels plus the OTA HD channels and combine them all into the same TV guide and switch repectively between tuners on the same card? I have never used a tuner card before so i don't know how to hook it up.

Also with the ATI internal cablecard and the Ceton quad tuner...Are they supported in the tv server yet? I would love to use that more than anything else. I have searched for about 2 hours all over the net about this and the latest post I found was back in 2009.

My hardware is as follows:

Win 7 Ult.
ATI HD 5750
2x 1tb WD green
160 2.5" for OS
250gb for system backup
silverstone htpc case
core i5
4gb ddr3
harmony 550 (works awesome since I can use different mappings for external programs [hulu desktop, Arcsoft])
marantz reciever
orb audio sats
SVS subwoofer

Bear with me as this is my first post, and I'm excited about this new frontend.

also, what Tuner card(s) would you recommend, I ultimately want to run 2 rooms.

Thanks,

Drew

 

[DreadFury]

I use an WinTV 1800 for analog/ATSC channels, and also have the HD-PVR to record HD from my cablebox.
I also would be interested in using a cablecard in the US, but when I call my cablecompany (TimeWarner) nobody even knows what I am talking about, some CSRs even going so far as saying it doesn't exist...

The US cable companies sure love to hide this info from us, they would get rid of it all together if it wasn't THE LAW to allow and support it. (even tho they have no problem playing dumb)

Also, no matter how many rooms you want to run this in, you only need tuners on one 'server' while the rest can stream all video and change channels through your network.

 

[eyelobes]

Yeah I can see where I pull the cablecard out of my knology boxes. I just want to make sure the centon $400 card is compatible before I even attempt it.

Also If i hook up make cable from the wall to the input of the tuner and an hdtv OTA antenna to the antenna port. would MP combine all of the channels in the tv guide or would it be two seperate guides, one for the cable and one for the OTA.

There is this one I'm looking at:

Multi-Stream Tuner Cards by Ceton | Products

Since the internal ati cablecard tuner only has one decoder and is about 200 on ebay the aforementioned card looks way more appealing. plus reviews I've read said the picture from the centon is way better.

 

[DreadFury]

I too have been waiting for this card since last year, but I am pretty sure it is still locked down to only WMC.

I know the FCC has changed the law and now software is no longer required to comply with it's regulations, just the hardware. (which it does.)

I am not sure where Ceton is at when it comes to supporting unregulated (non WMC) software, but I read awhile back that it was in the works.
If and when this is done, MP shouldn't have much trouble supporting the device, but more in-depth info will have to come from a dev.

I am greatly interested in your success with this, please keep us posted on what you plan to do and how it goes!

 

[eyelobes]

The whole thing is, I would like to get a more definitive answer on support before I dummp $400 on the quad tuner card. I know nothing of programming so I would not be any help to the community aside from whether it works or not.

I am in the process of converting all of my m2ts bluray rips to mkv so i can have the chapter support and it is painstakingly slow.

It will be a couple of months until I can afford the quad tuner anyways. It just stinks that the community is largly based outside of the US.

OK,

so after looking around for a fews hours, it seems, I see why the ati and centon cards do not play nice with media portal. Apparently the cablecard tuners show up a Gbit NIC adapters in windows. To the TV server it shows up as no card being installed. So if we can get tv server to recognize the cards installed as nics then there would not be an issue.

Like I said before, I have no programming experience so I wouldn't have a clue as to how to get this resolved. If anyone has any insight on how to go about correcting this, I would like to know.

 

[eyelobes]

OK,

Well I found this link that looks promising to all of us wanting to use the centon or ati cablecards.

FCC to bring down new CableCARD rules in October 14th meeting -- Engadget HD

 

[mm1352000]

***bump***
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/cablecard-tuner-support-for-mediaportal-1.112585/