SureWest IPTV

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SureWest uses IPTV by sending the raw MPEG2TS (or as of 5/24/2009, h264) stream directly to a UDP multicast address. This means it's relatively easy to set up mythtv. Their DVR interface is horrible, and so mythtv is a huge step up. If you order their DVR, you should be allowed to record two channels at once by setting up two identical tuners. For two tuners to work correctly, you need at least SVN revision 18969 (on the 0.21 branch.) Otherwise it works around half the time. PIP also works sometimes.

On my box, recording two channels at once makes watching a third unusable (too choppy) but with a very fast CPU and disk subsystem you might be able to record perhaps three or four channels and still watch something.

What you need

  • MythTV 0.21 or better with the built-in IPTV tuner
  • SureWest Fiber IPTV
  • An Amino or DVR settop box
  • A spare network port on your mythtv box (sharing with your WAN network is a very bad idea). This card needs to support software setup of the MAC address (most do).
  • As of 5/24/2009, SureWest has switched from MPEG2 streams to h264 for their HD channels. For this reason, a video card supporting VDPAU is recommended for an HDTV frontent, unless the frontend has a very powerful CPU.
  • As of 2014 merger between Surewest and CC, these features no longer work.