Digital Cable Channels?

[fromans4]

Will a Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 MCE receive "Digital Cable Channels", or do I need a QAM capable tuner card?

My Cable company is Comcast and I wanted to try splitting the signal before the STB and route one line directly to an HTPC tuner card for receiving un-encrypted channels. The other line would go through the STB and directly into my AV processor for all encrypted and hidef channels.

Does this sound reasonable?
Is the PVR150 a good choice for this?

Thanks,
Brent

[stanger89]

99.9% of digital cable channels are encrypted and nothing (asside from a cable box) can recieve/decode them. The 150 will be fine, but you'll have to go through the cable box to use it.

[BenDover]

i thought that the local broadcast channels have to be carried unencrypted on digital cable. i know my cable company doesn't encrypt even its premium channels, for the moment. the myhd 130 is the most recent qam capable pc tuner card; the accessdtv also does some limited qam decoding (only 64 i believe, not 256 which most cable companies use).

[madpoet]

Locals, sure. Most of the channels on Digital Cable are not locals.

[Cliff Watson]

[QUOTE=madpoet]Locals, sure. Most of the channels on Digital Cable are not locals.[/QUOTE]


So far I have 40 QAM channels. My CableCo is converting all analog channels over to digital.

[stanger89]

You guys are lucky, I've got 0.

[fromans4]

I have been reading the thread about using the firewire port from your STB to capture digital and hi-def channels. If these channels are encrypted won't that stop this from working as well?

I am trying to get the cleanest path possible for both SD & HD from Comcast cable. I realize that there is no way to get arround encrytion, but could I connect the STB to my HTPC via component video to a holo3grapghII card. As far as I can tell this will allow me to scale and view SD and HD content. I can't find any info on weather the content can be captured using this card. I also can't find sorces for it???

Is there anything else out there like this? Or, are there any other solutions to the problem of viewing encrypted HD content?

Thanks in advance,
Brent

[fromans4]

I heard something about the Fusion 5 HDTV card being QAM 256 capable and also designed for MCE. Has anyone seen or worked with this yet??

Brent

[madpoet]

Yes, it's QAM256 capable (but only unscrambled). So is the MyHD130 (and the Fusion3 for that matter).

[stanger89]

[QUOTE=fromans4]I realize that there is no way to get arround encrytion, but could I connect the STB to my HTPC via component video to a holo3grapghII card. As far as I can tell this will allow me to scale and view SD and HD content. I can't find any info on weather the content can be captured using this card. I also can't find sorces for it???[/QUOTE]

No, you can't record with the Holo3D.