United States of America
From reading these forums, I gather that a large portion of the userbase is not from the US/Canada. While it means you've made some great strides in the DVB area, it means us North Americans have been left out to dry in the HD world! While MP supports OTA HD, there are two other methods of capturing HD available in NA: Clear QAM, and Firewire. Clear QAM, in my mind, is limited utility since you only pick up a few channels (broadcast, pretty much the same as OTA), Firewire, however, sometimes lets you get dozens. I have read that some cable companies even let you record premium channels such as HBO.
Reasons why Firewire tuning should be supported:
1.) No other PVR software I've found natively supports it, they are all hacks (unfortunately I can't even find a hack for MP).
2.) In the US, EVERY STB has to have a functioning Firewire port as of April 1 2004. This means it is a method available to almost every digital/HD cable subscriber in the US (and I assume since Canada uses the same technology, the companies ship the same boxes to the US and Canada).
3.) Even if we can't capture the stream (some cable cos encrypt it), we can at least use firewire as a great alternative to an IR blaster.
Hopefully at this point I've convinced some of the developers out there to give this feature a look. There are already drivers out there to get most of the common STBs communicating in a language you can work with. That language is the AV/C Panel and AV/C Device.
The former allows tuning. Meaning, instead of using an IR Blaster, we can tune over Firewire. Think of it as the end of the delay between IR message and acceptance, and of IR signals that are missed leading to recording the wrong channel. This, I consider, to be step 1 of Firewire support. Essentially, when I setup my connections, I should be able to specify an IR blaster, or a firewire AV/C panel device to associate with the connection.
Step 2 is more formidable. Firewire actually streams the digital content in all its glory (full HD resolutions, surround sound, etc.). If MP could capture this, it would open HD cable up. Plus, this gives us another benefit. I have a dual tuner card. Right now tuner #1 is analog (splitter), #2 is s-video coming from my STB. If you supported Firewire tuning, I could have #1 and #2 analog while #3 (firewire) is its own independent tuner for my digital/HD content.
Hopefully at least someone out there on the development side will respond to this. I've seen a few posts on these forums about the feature, but nothing really came of any of them. This is the one thing that is really preventing me from giving MP a chance. If I can't record digital/HD, it's pretty much useless to me when the alternatives (MCE, SageTV, and BeyondTV) all have a (hacky) way of letting me record my digital/HD content over Firewire.
Reasons why Firewire tuning should be supported:
1.) No other PVR software I've found natively supports it, they are all hacks (unfortunately I can't even find a hack for MP).
2.) In the US, EVERY STB has to have a functioning Firewire port as of April 1 2004. This means it is a method available to almost every digital/HD cable subscriber in the US (and I assume since Canada uses the same technology, the companies ship the same boxes to the US and Canada).
3.) Even if we can't capture the stream (some cable cos encrypt it), we can at least use firewire as a great alternative to an IR blaster.
Hopefully at this point I've convinced some of the developers out there to give this feature a look. There are already drivers out there to get most of the common STBs communicating in a language you can work with. That language is the AV/C Panel and AV/C Device.
The former allows tuning. Meaning, instead of using an IR Blaster, we can tune over Firewire. Think of it as the end of the delay between IR message and acceptance, and of IR signals that are missed leading to recording the wrong channel. This, I consider, to be step 1 of Firewire support. Essentially, when I setup my connections, I should be able to specify an IR blaster, or a firewire AV/C panel device to associate with the connection.
Step 2 is more formidable. Firewire actually streams the digital content in all its glory (full HD resolutions, surround sound, etc.). If MP could capture this, it would open HD cable up. Plus, this gives us another benefit. I have a dual tuner card. Right now tuner #1 is analog (splitter), #2 is s-video coming from my STB. If you supported Firewire tuning, I could have #1 and #2 analog while #3 (firewire) is its own independent tuner for my digital/HD content.
Hopefully at least someone out there on the development side will respond to this. I've seen a few posts on these forums about the feature, but nothing really came of any of them. This is the one thing that is really preventing me from giving MP a chance. If I can't record digital/HD, it's pretty much useless to me when the alternatives (MCE, SageTV, and BeyondTV) all have a (hacky) way of letting me record my digital/HD content over Firewire.
It also causes my machine to freak out and start changing channels all over the place and recording distorted video about once a week, and that's when it works at all: 
