Why we can't record our TV shows (was: In case you have not seen it.....Linux Media Center)

[Bill McGonigle]

On Mar 26, 2007, at 09:04, Tom Buskey wrote:

> As a TiVo owner and former DirecTV subscriber, I couldn't figure  
> out why
> people would get a DirecTiVo instead of a stand alone.

I'm building my MythTV box after having a Dish DVR-508 for about 3- 
ish years.  The two advantages it had were:

1) $199, 3 years ago.  This was before they instituted a "DVR-fee" so  
it beat the pants off TiVo on cost.
2) I pull raw MPEG-2 streams off of my hard drive and onto DVD.   
There's no quality loss between the uplink station and my DVD player.

The downside is the software sucks so hard I'm building a MythTV box  
despite the fact that recordings will be of lower quality.  Nothing  
like a DVR that crashes to ameliorate the WAF of the MythTV box.  The  
hardware also is replete with cold solder joints which I need to put  
a heat gun to once in a while.  I'll probably still use it as a  
receiver, with the hard drive decommissioned for noise control.

I was going to buy a Conditional Access Module to decrypt the DVB-S  
stream with my SmartCard straight into MythTV but the one vendor has  
apparently been sued off the market (on 'hacking' grounds, but it  
also managed to eliminate legitimate competition).  Analog appears to  
be the best of poor choices in our environment of regulatory  
capture.  If I payed a bit more attention in EE class I could  
probably find an old receiver and extricate the CAM from it, tying it  
into the linux DVB code.  That's a project for perhaps after analog  
is working.  Anyway, the point is the integrated units give you that  
quality without taking any EE classes.  I hear a new TiVo can take a  
cablecard - I haven't looked into what's possible there with  
satellite, but I haven't heard anybody talking about it either.

-Bill

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