On Jan 8, 2008 4:11 PM, William Munson <<a href="mailto:w.munson@comcast.net">w.munson@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">Larry K wrote:<br>> Well, that would be great if I could do that. How can I tell what<br>> channels will be available to the HDRD, before I go buy one?<br>><br></div>That is the rub with the HDHR, you cannot even tell what channels you
<br>are receiving as there is no mapping of qam transport channels to actual<br>channels. In fact you will have to manually figure out what each channel<br>is and then manually enter the data into the database and then will have
<br>to look up what the xmltvid number is for that channel. I would strongly<br>recommend that you spend the time getting a firewire stb set up.<br>Although quirky its far far easier than setting up a hdhr. Here in<br>Florida the cable company (comcast) has a nasty habit of moving channels
<br>around every few weeks which is completely transparent when using a stb<br>but will cause you large amounts of frustration when all of a sudden you<br>start recording garbage or nothing at all.<br><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">
<br></div></div></blockquote></div>I have three DCT-6xxx set-top boxes streaming over firewire and an HDHomeRun, so I can comment from experience here.<br><br>Here is the advantages/disadvantages of each. Your mileage may vary, depending on your cable/satellite provider.
<br><br>Firewire from set-top box:<br><br>Advantages: <br><ul><li> I get all of the analog, digital and HD channels to which I subscribe.</li></ul>Disadvantages:<br><ul><li>It works only 90% time. Intermittently, the set-top boxes fail to change channels and/or stream video.
</li></ul><br>HDHomeRun:<br><br>Advantages: <br><ul><li>Extremely reliable channel changes and streaming</li><li>Captures all unencrypted, digital QAM channels</li><li>Setting up the hardware and accessing from MythTV is easy.
<br>
</li></ul>Disadvantages:<br><ul><li>Does not capture analog channels</li><li>Does not capture encrypted channels<br></li><li>My cable provider does not provide QAM versions of most analog channels and encrypts just about everything except a few HD channels and the
std.def counterparts.</li><li>Figuring out which channel is which and then hand-setting the XMLTVID is a royal pain.<br></li></ul>So, in a nutshell, I love the HDHomeRun now that I have configured all of the channels. The HDHomeRun tuners are set with a higher priority so they get chosen first for recordings. But I only get a subset of the channels that we watch - so I have to use set-top boxes for now.
<br><br>What I want for the future is for a CableCard-enabled device that works like the HDHomeRun with multiple tuners that accepts cable coax as input and streams MPEG out for all the channels to which I subscribe. Oh, and while we are at it, let me select the 20-30 channels that I actually watch and not pay for the 500+ plus that I never tune.
<br><br>Tom<br> <br>