[mythtv-users] HDHR Prime Success

David Brieck Jr. dbrieck at gmail.com
Wed May 30 13:47:54 UTC 2012


Thought I would pass this information along to help anyone who's on my
cable system since I don't think there's that many of us doing
homebrew PVR...

I bought the HDHR Prime on Woot recently for $130 in hopes of
simplifying my MythTV setup. Before making the purchase I called
support at Blue Ridge Cable in PA to ask them about CableCard support.

I was mainly interested in finding out if they make the channels
anything other than Copy-Freely. Turns out no one used the words
copy-freely or access-controlled at all in our discussions. They
simply said that they don't do anything to the channels and unless the
network did "something" the CableCard would decrypt them just like a
cable box would.

Not exactly a vote of confidence, but at $130, it wasn't that big of a
risk (I could resell it on Amazon if it didn't work out).

I picked up the CableCard yesterday and they also gave me an SDV
adapter. Silicon Dust calls it a USB Tuning Resolver, but Blue Ridge
just called it a switching box. Pricing for an HD cable box (non-pvr)
and the CableCard are the same, so on my bill this is a wash (but I
get two more tuners).

I asked the resident techie who came out to explain things if I could
record on three tuners with their M-Card and he said they only do two.
Again, not very encouraging, but considering they never heard of an HD
HomeRun Prime and had only ever had them installed in Tivo's and
"computers" I was skeptical that they knew what they were talking
about.

The Prime came yesterday as well so when I got home from work I
started unpacking and getting things setup so I could call in and
activate the CableCard. They only recently started allowing self
installs, so I was planning on a lot of pain on the phone. As
instructed I did NOT hookup the SDV adapter because they said it can
sometimes interfere with the activation process. After waiting forever
on hold it took about 10 minutes for the CSR to get the information
needed to activate the card.

Oddly, they wanted the MAC address of the CableCard in addition to the
HostID and CardID. I'm guessing that was just so he could find it in
their system, but it took some time to figure out where that was in
the web app on the Prime.

After hanging up it took about 10 minutes for the activation to go
through. Initially I didn't bother to hookup the SDV adapter because I
figured just the crappy channels were on SDV. Turns out more than just
a few channels were inaccessible until hooking it up and that cost me
some time figuring out what was wrong.

After hooking up the adapter and waiting for it to initialize (about
10 minutes) I had to unplug/plug in the Prime because it seemed to
lockup when tuning channels.

But after that, success! I could tune all of my channels with MythTV
and channels changes were really quick. I don't subscribe to any
premium channels so I can't say if they are copy-freely or not, but
everything else is great. All three tuners also worked without a
problem.

As a result I'm able to stop using a combination of PVR-250s, HDPVR,
and an original HDHomeRun (with antenna). I'll also be able to
re-purpose a slave backend and save the power bill from that as well.

This is definitely the way to go if your cable company allows
copy-freely on their channels.

David

P.S. If you're interested in any of my now unused equipment email me
off list. I also have a brand new HDPVR Killer that I won't be needing
now either.


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