External STB? (1 Viewer)

charnov

Portal Member
August 1, 2006
23
0
MediaPortal Version: 1.0.2

Okay, I just had my cable company ram an external set top box down my throat as part of the USA converting to all digital cable. I was given the choice of "free" STB or no more cable. OTA sucks here, so this is it. I tried to hook the cable straight to my analog card and got nothing but scrambled channels. I also tried and ATSC tuner and got 2 channels advertising HDTV so no dice there, either.

How in the heck do you use MediaPortal with and external box? I have read all of the forums posts and wiki sections I could search for and the only answer I have found so far is "it doesn't work, it's next to impossible, you can't turn off the buffer so the remote doesn't work right, the EPG will have to be done by hand (for 200 channels!!! NO FARKING WAY!), etc, etc."

I have been running an HTPC since the very early days of myHTPC and Meedio (so many years ago) and I don't see any way to keep doing it. If anyone out there knows how to do two things I will be eternally grateful:

1. How the heck do I switch to live television with no buffer? Since the cable box runs everything and has dozens of menus, the delays in button clicks is maddening (the wife threw the remote at the TV and broke it (the remote, not the TV)... it is very frustrating). This is the deal breaker. I have to be able to do this to keep using the software.

2. How do you set up the EPG in MediaPortal without wanting to kill yourself? I have over 200 channels (most are sports package stuff) and setting them all to channel 3 by hand is NOT gonna happen. I need a tool to put the channels right. This is not as important. I have video on demand, so I don't really care about recording anything or pausing anymore.
 

Rick19861911

Portal Member
March 23, 2009
9
0
Pennsylvania
Home Country
United States of America United States of America
I'm not sure I totally understand your questions, but I'll take a shot at answering by telling a little about my setup. First, do you have an infrared receiver and blaster?. That is what I use to change the channels on my set top box. With mediaportal, I am using the IR Blaster plugin to do this. As far as the EPG goes, I had a terrible time trying the standard route, and ended up using the SchedulesDirect plugin. It costs around $20 per year but it has made life a lot easier when setting up Mediaportal. With the SD plugin all you do is download your channel lineup from them and then all your channels should appear in the configuration interface. Once you have all your channels in there you map them out to your tv card and hopefully everything works. MediaPortal can be a real pain to set up at times, but once you get it working it rocks.
 

finrudd341

Portal Pro
February 24, 2008
208
16
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Home Country
Brazil Brazil
Hi Charnov - I am facing the same problem here in Brazil - as I am unable to connect the cable feed directly into my Digital everywhere card (can't get C*M to work) I am thinking of taking the feed from the STB output over coaxia cable to the TV card.

I suspect I have a problem with the card being digital, and the input being analogue, so you are one step ahead of me with the analogue card..

As for the channel blasting - that is a mystery I have yet to get to - if you made any progress on this, please post it back, as I suspect many of us cable users with encrypted/scrambled channels will suffer this problem without being able to replicate the CAM function and smart cards on the original STB.

Good luck!
 

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