TV Tuner and Digital Cable?

[coolfrood]

Just curious to know, how does a TV tuner card work with digital cable? I'm thinking of setting up a MythTV box, but I want to know if I will be able to record/view all my channels. The way I understand it, the input for the TV tuner will come before the cable box, so would it be possible to tune into the encrypted channels? Am I missing something?

[mrben]

Assuming the situation is roughly the same as the UK, you will need to put a feed from your decoder box into your TV tuner, meaning you should be able to record from the channel currently selected on the decoder box.

If you put the tuner _before_ the decoder box, then the signal will be encoded.

[coolfrood]

That is pretty lame. What that means is that I cannot effectively use the program guide to schedule recordings, i.e. I can only record for the station I am tuned into. I don't know how many channels come unencrypted, but I don't think there will be too many.

-Akshat

[Patrick]

When I had MythTV running I was using with my Dishnetwork reciever. Satellite signal is encrypted and the reciever box decodes it. I ran the coaxial out to the input of my TV card. It worked fine. I could record shows. For scheduled recordings I had to setp an IR blaster to change the channels on the satellite receiver. In effect the blaster tricked the box into thinking it was recieving a signal from the remote. It worked fine. As far as using a program guide the MythTV guide was way more extensive and accurate then the one on the satellite reciever which only held about 48 hours worth of programming. I imagine digital cable to be the same as satellite. FYI, you don't even need a capture card for some of the newer Hi-Def cable recievers. A lot of them have a firewire out port. Alas, I don't own a hi-def TV or think it's available in my area yet. Sometime in the future I'll with them.