[olug] MythTV and firewire control of Cox digital cable tuner

[Brian Roberson]

Will Langford wrote:
>> From reading the Motorola manual for the DCH3416 (my decoder box), it touts
>> the FireWire and HDMI as being the two preferred digital HD ports for
>> connecting a TV.
>>
>> I walked through the cable box on-screen setup menus but couldn't find
>> anything referring to FireWire/1394 (but I'm sleepy and could have missed
>> it).
>>
>> Tomorrow I'll call Cox and open a ticket, and tomorrow night I'll play with
>> the MythTV side to see if it can see anything on the other side of the
>> cable.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>     
>
>
> Just a quick side note.  If it does spit out data via firewire, I believe
> it's still in an encrypted Transport Stream 'file' (since Cox encrypts
> everything, I imagine they'd tell the box to encrypt the out going firewire
> as well).  Not too useful without something to decode it... which doesn't
> exist afaik.
>
> Secondly, yes, you might be able to at least change channels with it.  Do
> you really wanna blow $30 on a firewire cable just to have faster channel
> change times as compared to an IR blaster ?.  And be severely limited in
> cable length?
>   

I have used the firewire port many times before - It is a straight MPEG2 
stream (no encryption)

If you couple this input and a little IR trickery for channel changing, 
you can litterally use the cable box as a tuner card.