tuner for spectrum cable?

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jimls
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tuner for spectrum cable?

Post by jimls »

I have run MythTV for years for OTA stuff and it's been great. Before we dropped DirectTV years ago we didn't have a way to record that. Spectrum cable is running cable in front of my house (for free after saying it would be $5000 about 6 months ago) so am probably going to switch to them for internet. That gives me the option of also using them for TV. I have zero knowledge of what I would need for hardware to record that or even if it is possible with encryption and probably DRM too.

I looks like there may be cloud options for recording - I need to look into that. Another issue is how many set top boxes I need. We have one main TV but two others that we use so do I need 3 STBs? Not sure how the hardware works these days. That's not a Myth question but something I need to figure out. If I could get the recordings into myth then a simple myth front end at each TV would work.

Mainly asking about tuner hardware. Location is the USA and currently have a dual silicon dust tuner for OTA stuff which is all myth is used for.
mythpi
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Re: tuner for spectrum cable?

Post by mythpi »

I have Spectrum and use a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime tuner (with a cable card, which Spectrum rents for substantially less than an STB). It provides 3 tuners. I have a pi4 running Debian 64-bit, which I use as a master backend, plus 2 pi4 frontends, which I also run a variety of other things on, which allow me to use 2 TVs. Recordings are stored on a 5TB USB hard-drive (not SSD), but all three run the OS off of SSDs. I figured out when I started the build-out that I would recoup my costs in under a year over renting two STBs, plus I can store a lot more recordings than a normal STB, plus I can get commercial skip (which is a bit hit-or-miss, but generally works well).

One note: I don't subscribe to HBO, Starz, etc. - it's possible the DRM on them would be an issue, but I'm simply not interested in paying for them.

My system works quite well, and jfabernathy provides excellent guides for building pi4 versions of MythTV.

That said, I'd replace all of it with YouTube TV (and have no hardware outlay), *if* I could get Avalanche hockey coverage there - but it's not possible, due to blackout regulations which are out-dated and monopolistic (how is it that in Montana, I'm in the local broadcast area of 3 separate hockey teams, none of which are closer than an 11 hour drive from here?).
jimls
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Re: tuner for spectrum cable?

Post by jimls »

I am not interested in premium channels. Youtube TV looks like a reasonable option but wondering how easy to use the user interface is. Would be nice to have a TV like remote. And is there any capability to record for later viewing? Commercial skip like MythTV? (I realize it isn't 100% on flagging commercials but it's good enough to be a plus.
bshanteau
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Re: tuner for spectrum cable?

Post by bshanteau »

I use an inexpensive used Ceton Infinitv 4 with a cablecard and the newest drivers installed with dkms. Make sure the cable adapter is included with the card you buy.

In Ubuntu, unzip the drivers to /usr/src/ctn91xx-2017: https://github.com/JamesRHarris/infinit ... master.zip
Name the following file dkms.conf and copy it to /usr/src/ctn91xx-2017

Code: Select all

# /usr/src/ctn91xx-2017/dkms.conf
MAKE="make KERNEL_VERSION=${kernelver}"
CLEAN="make clean"
BUILT_MODULE_NAME=ctn91xx
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION=/extra/
BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION=
PACKAGE_NAME=ctn91xx
PACKAGE_VERSION=2017
AUTOINSTALL=yes
# REMAKE_INITRD=yes
Open a terminal and run:

Code: Select all

sudo apt install dkms
cd /usr/src/ctn91xx-2017/
sudo dkms add -m ctn91xx -v 2017
sudo dkms build -m ctn91xx -v 2017
sudo dkms install -m ctn91xx -v 2017
sudo modprobe ctn91xx
Install the 4 tuners in MythTV using MythTV Baclend Setup->Capture cards->Ceton Cablecard Tuner using the default address and Tuners 0-3.

You can sometimes use one tuner to record two programs by setting: MythTV Backend Setup->Input Connections->Input 1-4->Interactions Between Inputs->Max Recordings=2
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