CableCards and Cox

[SoonerDave]

Anyone here had any experience using CableCards from Cox, either in conjunction with a retail box like a TiVo or with their own in-home PVR setup, such as MythTV?

[Pete]

I use a cablecard in my TiVo units with FIOS. Works like a charm.

I was an early adopter of TiVo and now I really can't do without it.

[SoonerDave]

I use a cablecard in my TiVo units with FIOS. Works like a charm.

I was an early adopter of TiVo and now I really can't do without it.

Awesome to hear, Pete. I'm only now starting to read up on the CableCard capability and I'm now thinking I've really let the potential get away from me all this time.

I have grand plans: I'd like to build a genuine in-home media service and use a tuner with CableCard running MythTV backend to distribute the cable and PVR throughout the house via Raspberry PI clients running KODI with the MythTV addon.

Most of the tuner devices are intended to work with Windows Media Center, but many if not all of the cards can be run under a special distro of Linux. There's a 6-tuner unit by a company called Ceton that would be absolutely perfect, but I hear varying stories about its stability, and it's $300, so it's not something to play with.

I know that Cox Cablecards require a Tuning Adapter that hooks into the host tuner's USB port, but then the tuners themselves often hook up via USB, so I'm not clear how they integrate into the computer if the only USB port is taken.

So amid my grand plans is still some learning and I'm trying to find some folks with experience

[barrettd]

Cable cards are great when they work. In my past experiences with Cox and cablecards, I usually ended up knowing more about them than the technician. Make sure if they come out to install they have several, as the cards are very finicky and may or may not work with any rhyme or reason. Also, the customer service and sales folks usually don't even know what they are when you call about them.

[mkjeeves]

My Tivo has had a Cox card in it since the first day. Works fine. I was of the understanding it wouldn't work with cable without it, but maybe it just wouldn't get all the channels. Cox charges a couple of bucks a month for the card.

I'm about to install an antenna and see how that works with the Tivo. Possibly this weekend. The Tivo does have an antenna input next to the cable input. I'm curious to see how well it figures out the channels and if it builds a guide for them. If that works, the cable card is coming out and going back to cox.

[BBatesokc]

I'm using one with my Cox + Tivo service without fail so far.

I'm totally addicted to Tivo.

[SoonerDave]

My Tivo has had a Cox card in it since the first day. Works fine. I was of the understanding it wouldn't work with cable without it, but maybe it just wouldn't get all the channels. Cox charges a couple of bucks a month for the card.

I'm about to install an antenna and see how that works with the Tivo. Possibly this weekend. The Tivo does have an antenna input next to the cable input. I'm curious to see how well it figures out the channels and if it builds a guide for them. If that works, the cable card is coming out and going back to cox.

I do know that the CableCard, in the ideal world, provides your STB exactly those channels you've paid for and get with a regular STB - with the exception of anything interactive, eg on demand, PPV. It used to be that some or all of the "non-premium" cable channels were required to be provided unencrypted over QAM (over what's called "Clear QAM,"), but our beloved FCC let the cable folks off the hook and now let them encrypt just about whatever they want over QAM. As a result, there's a chronically decreasing amount of content available to people who have QAM "cable-ready" tuners, forcing people to rent STB's to *get* the content for which they're *already* paying.

Some of the retail STB's that accept CableCards have OTA (clear) QAM tuners, some don't. And the PVR capability is potentially further limited by the degree to which the provider abides the various copy flags, and that varies widely by providers across the country.

For my own experimentation, I've opted against the really nice-sounding $300 Ceton 6-tuner card due to its iffy operational issues. I backed off to a SiliconDust HDHomeRun 3-tuner device that was not even half the price of the Ceton, and had considerably more favorable feedback on some various KODI and MythTV sites/forums I've been reading. As of this morning, and later reading the docs on Cox's website, I'm not sure I have to have the tuning adapter after all. They clearly required on *at some point in the past*, but some of the more recent documents make no such reference to the TA.

The tuner comes tomorrow, and I should be able to pick up the cablecard at the Cox store next door. We'll put some of those unused CPU cycles on my big Ubuntu box to work and see how it goes. The idea of adding possibly two new rooms to my cable setup and a whole-home DVR is too good not to at least *try* and make it work. We'll see how it goes, and I'll post my results here for posterity

[mkjeeves]

A year or two ago they also had me add a Cisco 1520 Tuning Adapter into the mix. They provided it and don't charge an additional fee for it. It was supposed to ensure we got all the channels we were paying for but I couldn't tell it made any difference. We have a lot more channels than we care to keep track of.

[SoonerDave]

A year or two ago they also had me add a Cisco 1520 Tuning Adapter into the mix. They provided it and don't charge an additional fee for it. It was supposed to ensure we got all the channels we were paying for but I couldn't tell it made any difference. We have a lot more channels than we care to keep track of.

Well this is the next part of the equation I don't quite yet understand. Some cable providers now employ what's called Switched Digital Video. A cable provider may use SDV for some, all, or none of its channels; but if it's used, a Tuning Adapter is what's required to leverage it in an STB with a CableCard.

I've read widely varying reports ranging from "I could only get two channels and now I get four billion" after adding a TA, to "It didn't make any difference at all." Reality is somewhere in the middle, I suspect. I'm going to pick up my CableCard later this afternoon, so we'll see how it all falls out.

-David

[jn1780]

Well this is the next part of the equation I don't quite yet understand. Some cable providers now employ what's called Switched Digital Video. A cable provider may use SDV for some, all, or none of its channels; but if it's used, a Tuning Adapter is what's required to leverage it in an STB with a CableCard.

I've read widely varying reports ranging from "I could only get two channels and now I get four billion" after adding a TA, to "It didn't make any difference at all." Reality is somewhere in the middle, I suspect. I'm going to pick up my CableCard later this afternoon, so we'll see how it all falls out.

-David

I bet thereality is that its a billion channels that no one cares about which is pretty much 75% of the channels on cable.

[SoonerDave]

I bet thereality is that its a billion channels that no one cares about which is pretty much 75% of the channels on cable.

I picked up my CableCard a few minutes ago, and the Tuning Adapter they gave me is bigger than my stinking cablemodem! The salesman at the Cox office mentioned the Tuning Adapter was necessary for some channels, and he tried looking for a list, but couldn't find one. I suggested he search for "SDV" and he got three links on his Cox-internal database, but none of them gave him a list of switched channels. Oh, well. No biggie. I would prefer *not* to use the TA, and if I find that SDV is used for the worthless things like the Music channels, I won't care. Even if it overlaps to one or two channels I might watch once or twice a year, I could live without them if that meant not dealing with the Tuning Adapter.

We'll see. Tuner box arrives tomorrow. Woohoo

[mkjeeves]

The tuning adapter they gave me is larger than my blue ray player.

[tfvc.org]

I worked for a cable company up to about 5 years ago so take this with a grain of salt, 5 years ago when switched video was first starting to roll out, my understanding was sdv was mostly for on demand type channels and the less popular channels so they could offer more channels using the same bandwidth. Don't know if that technology has expanded, but at that time it was a test and if it went well it would expand to more and more channels so they could offer more and more channels over time.

[SoonerDave]

I thought I'd update my CableCard project. And, I'll warn in advance, my results are...disappointing.

The first CableCard I picked up refused to "pair" with my tuner box (a dandy SiliconDust HomeRun Prime 3-tuner box). Adding insult to injury was the fact that the Tuning Adapter Cox provided wouldn't even sync up with the Cox headend properly, so I couldn't get...anything for most of Saturday. After getting on the phone with Cox off and on most of Saturday afternoon and conceding a new CableCard was necessary, I realized the revelation was about 15 minutes after the Cox Solutions Store about 500 yards from my house had closed for the day...and that moved me to Monday.

Monday arrived, and I took my CC and TA back to Cox, and they swapped me for new ones - took them home, plugged them in by virtue of a rather specific set of instructions, and called the auto authentication line - and it didn't take. Called the special support number Cox has for CCs, and she got it to go in about five minutes. Plugged in the Tuning Adapter, and this time - after about ten minutes, VOILA, everything was activated, validated, succeeded, blinking the right way, and was happy. At least I thought it was happy.

So I set out to scan channels on my tuners, and now I see 469 (!) channels. I was frothing at the mouth at the prospect of getting my streaming setup going, had built a Rasbperry Pi 2 box with Kodi to use as a test for an "extra room" extension, and all seemed swimming...until I started noticing something.

None of my specific cable package's channels were coming through.

ESPN, TNT, TBS (and many others) simply wouldn't view. At all. Initially, I thought the CableCard either wasn't performing the decryption or didn't recognize my subscription, but the logs on my tuner clearly showed that every channel I tuned was "subscribed" and and outbound rts:// stream to my MythTV back-end server was firing exactly as it was supposed to (properly logged as "Channel XYZ streaming rts://192.168.1.100:30"), so I thought I just needed to tweak something to solve why I couldn't *see* the stream. I even fired up VLC to try testing the stream directly...no soap. The only streams that worked were...the basic digital channels...so I submitted myself to the Google and began searching and reading.

And the more I read, the more I researched, the more discouraged I became - because here's the bottom line.

The channels are being decrypted, but the blasted DRM Copy Protection (CCI) flag for, as far as I've been able to tell, every encrypted channel is marked "Copy Once" - and those channels don't get displayed. By anything. So I'm back primarily to the most basic channels on Digital Cable; local stations. In other words, its almost worthless. My CableCard activation just buys me the opportunity to see that all these neat channels are out there. I just can't view them. From what I've read, Cox tries to pass the buck for setting the copy flag as being a mandate from their providers. Problem is we know this isn't true, because the same channels and content on other providers (and often on FIOS setups) is set to "copy freely." Some services within Cox across the country apparently don't even implement CCI consistently.

While I can still, theoretically, go ahead and build out this thing (heck, the basics are already in place and sorta working, although streaming the unencrypted HD content from my tuner is *really* choppy), realizing that the "fun" channels we really wanted to serve out over the networked tuner were ones like ESPN, the Turner channels, some of the Sports channels,..eg, the fun stuff. If I want that content in other rooms, I'm forced to go back to renting another converter from Cox, and go up even further if I want to get their whole-home DVR. And, quite obviously, that's why Cox keeps the CCI flags set for all those channels - it blocks up anyone from trying to do exactly what I'm doing..

Yeah, I'm frustrated and disappointed. It looks like my $115 investment in my HomeRunPrime 3-tuner box will be a monument to the school of hard knocks. Yeah, I can build a "mini" shared tuner PVR setup, but not one that serves up much of value. My dream of building a fleet of Raspberry PI 2 boxes running KODI as clients to leverage the networked tuners is going to go by the boards as well, at least not beyond the one I've already built. The one positive in all this is having actually stuck my toes in the Raspberry PI world and found that to be INCREDIBLY intriguing. I had a 900Mhz computer with HD-capable video, networking, and USB connectivity built and running Linux in about a half-hour for about $85.

Who knows; maybe it's all a blessing in disguise. Getting a CableCard wasn't exactly cord-cutting, and it isn't exactly new technology, either. But it's just disappointing for a project that would have served both my geek instincts and served a legit purpose in my home was genuinely exciting, and finding out the reality will be much more limited is a downer.

I'll continue to play with my setup and try to get the cable guides and channel lists of what I *can* serve up resolved (miserably confusing thing, and you wouldn't BELIEVE how complicated program transmission in cable TV is; at least I was stunned), and get my Raspberry tweaked to at least get my concept done. I do need to figure out why my Prime has so much trouble streaming full HD video, especially considering it's hardwired to a full Gigabit network!

If anyone wants me to post more details on what I've done, I'll be glad to - it's been an educational effort, and gave me an excuse to build some more VM's and learn more about how cable TV works, so in that vein I suppose I got $200 worth of education out of it