TV Tuner - Tunning Comcast Digital Channels

I have a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 MC-Kit ( http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr1600mckit.html )TV Tuner and BlazeDTV 6.0 TV Tuner software in a fast Core i-530 (overclocked 20%) computer with a decent video card and Comcast Digital Cable service.

The Comcast Digital Cable service comes with many channels. On the televisions with the Comcast rented cable TV tuners, most channels seem to be playable without a problem.

When using the TV Tuner on the computer, I am not able to tune most the channels. Most the channels seem to be detectable, but are represented with a padlock icon and a "free_CA_mode" parameter set to "N". There are channels that do play and those channels have a "free_CA_mode" parameter set to "Y".

What can be done to play all the digital channels on the computer?

The only way is to run them through your cable box. If you had a Cable Card in your PC that would also work, but I dont think there is a reliable one on the market that works right.

You need one of these:
http://www.cetoncorp.com/

glorp said:

You need one of these:
http://www.cetoncorp.com/

Click to expand...

The tuner card seems to be priced at $399.

The price is quite (prohibtibly) high.

There is no other option except to buy a used and unsupported ATI DCT off ebay for about $200/tuner. The Ceton at least gives you 4 tuners and will (eventually) allow you to share all of them to other PCs on a network. If you want to capture encrypted cable broadcasts those are the current options.

You can wait a year for SiliconDust to (possibly) develop a 3 tuner model that people guess will cost ~$250. Also, possibly, a 2-tuner card from Ceton at around the same time and cost. Neither are sure things.

If you want to use a STB and connect it to an external box that will recapture an analog signal, take a look at the Hauppauge HD-PVR. It goes for about ~$150 but that only gets you one tuner and you still have to have a STB from the cableco. You also need to hook up an IR blaster from the HD-PVR to the STB because the STB is the only tuner in that case. It tends to be somewhat unreliable.

bchur83 said:

The only way is to run them through your cable box. If you had a Cable Card in your PC that would also work, but I dont think there is a reliable one on the market that works right.

Click to expand...

The idea of having the NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuner was to be able to watch different North America television bands directly on the computer without having to pay more rent to the cable company for equipment. With a cable box, I suppose that the audio and video streams can connected to the video and audio cards directly and the TV tuner card is unnecessary.

From what I have determined after a Google search, "free_CA_mode" seems to indicate whether or not a channel data is scrambled. This seems like an application of DRM to me.

It seems to me that this problem should be solvable with additional software. Perhaps a filter driver can be used to modify the QAM audio/video stream to remove the scrambling before a software application uses the stream. (This type of approach is often seen when working around optical disc DRM (encryption, region controls, etc.); filter driver modifies data stream to remove DRM)

Now a good question could be:

What software can be used to get around the channel scrambling>