[mythtv-users] Stupid question about tuning from cable boxes

[Josh White]

I'm currently working on building a home theater in my basement, and I'll
either be using a decent projector, or a 46"ish LDC HDTV.  My question
involves the HDTV thing.  I've never seen a working MythTV system that
worked with HD (In fact, I've never seen a mythtv system besides my own...in
person) and I was wondering what happens with the OSD.  Say I get a digital
cable box or 4 from Time Warner, control them with whatever (IR blaster, or
Firewire, or whathaveyou) and run them through an HD Homerun or something;
am I going to see the OSD from the box in addition to whatever myth
displays?  I'm just curious to see what I'll be getting into.  Obviously, I
don't want to see both, and I'm pretty happy with what I have right now with
my lowly SD system, and I'd like to be able to continue along the same path,
but with simply higher resolution.  What do all you HD myth users out there
see?

Also, after reading about the PCI style Digital cable tuners available from
ATI (which I realize are not supported by linux), does anyone know anything
about integrating these with a myth system?  I could imagine using an XP MCE
box, or a Vista box with one of these cards as a source (to deal with all
the proprietary DRM BS, etc.) and then finding a way to incorperate that
with a myth system (perhaps finding a way to control the windows machine vai
the network and then simply grabbing the frames...sort of like a HD Homerun
on steroids).  Maybe if I went that far, the whole mythtv layer would be
irrelevant; I don't know.

Anyway, that is something I've been pondering for a while, and I figured it
would be worth throwing out there.  I really like mythtv, and I'd like to
stick with it, but everything I've read about HD seems like a major pain
compared to using analog cable and a few PVR-250's & 500's.  Obviously, it
would be sweet to stick a card in a machine to replace the digital
cable/satellite box, but that doesn't seem like it will be a reality any
time soon.  I really hate the idea of renting several cable boxes just to be
able to have what I have now, but in higher resolution.

Thanks for reading my rant, and for any comments.

Josh
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