Originally posted by: silverpig
Doesn't your cable box come with its own remote? Why do you need the computer to change the channels on it?
Because he wants to be able to use his computer as a PVR. He wants to be able to record and watch digital TV on his computer.
The cable standards are non-existant here in the US. Each cable/digital subscriber sattalite company has their own little variation on the mpeg2 signals that they provide to their customers. They do this intentionally so that in addition to paying subscriber fees you have to purchase/rent the cable box from them.
You see it's perfectly legal to use any cable box you want on your cable. There is no such thing as a "illegal pirate cable box", just as long as you don't use it to illigally to steal services you didn't pay for. They are like telephones, at one point Ma' Bell when it was a monopoly tried to make it illegal to use 3rd party telephones on your phone line.
So in order to get a bit more money they just never use standards and theirfore it makes making cable boxes to expensive. Also there is no such thing as digital cable cards in the US for computers.
Now in Europe were they have the power to enforce these sort of things you have ditigal standards. DVB-T, DVB-C, DVB-S digital signal standards. One for radio, cable, and satalite. Because of that digital computer capture cards can be had for like 30-40 dollars.
But here we are forced to cobble together a thing like IR blaster, to control the cable box so we have to take the mpeg2 signals from the cable company, turn that into regular cable signals by the cable box, then encode it back to mpeg2 or whatever so it can be recorded/used on your computer.
I am hoping that the FCC will stop this sort of thing and make HDTV standard so we can use regular tuner cards (like in your TV!) to get those digital signals and not be forced to buy those stupid boxes for everything.
Or that's about what I understand. I am definately no expert in the area. Needless to say, this isn't the sort of thing that cable companies go around explaining to their customers.
see here for something interesting
I see 2 solutions:
A) use an IR blaster, I have an MCE usb one that came with my MCE box, would that work?
B) use a serial cable and directly control the box, I would hate to have to buy a serial cable just for this.
That's correct.
see here for a howto for mythtv
See the section on howto setup irblaster to be used with MythTV. This is the sort of thing you need to do. I don't know what app your using though.
Never used it myself.
Although, aren't those Mpeg2 cards cool? I just use bash stuff for them.
For instance you can record shows that mplayer can read by going:
cat /dev/video0 > recorded.show.mpeg2
(then I use mencoder (also from mplayer) to compress them down using libavcodec (mpeg4))
