Alternatives to Comcast

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 21:29 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> > I am strongly looking at DirectTV for tv ...
> 
>   I've got a friend who has DirecTV and really likes it.  Same number
> of channels, same quality, for less money.  He says he almost never
> has signal problems ("rain fade") -- only if there's heavy, wet snow
> on the dish.  From what I've heard, I guess it depends on how good
> your line-of-sight to the sky is.  He's on top of a hill and has a big
> field next to his house.  If you're in a valley and surrounded by
> trees, it might be a different story.  The only major drawback (to me)
> is you have to use their equipment for high def -- no TiVo or MythTV
> or anything.

That won't be the case Real Soon Now, thanks to the Hauppauge HD-PVR. My
buddy at Hauppauge pinged me a few weeks back about what MythTV
developer to put one in the hands of to add support for it to MythTV.

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/hd_pvr.html

It takes in high definition component (ypbpr) video and encodes it in
real-time to h.264, the spits it out via USB2 to your computer. In other
words, it completely bypasses any and all drm via the analog hole. Might
lose a bit of quality going from digital mpeg2 to analog to digital
h.264, but hey, not too shabby...



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com