Watching Rogers Digital TV on Linux

[Colin McGregor]

On 11/6/08, Stephen <stephen-d-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I currently have one digital decoder in the living room where I watch HDTV
> on the digital channels.
>
> Is there a tuner card that works under Linux that can handle Rogers' digital
> feed?

Directly the answer is no. All Rogers digital channels are encrypted,
and as far as I know nobody has yet broken the encryption scheme.

There are several tuner cards / devices on the market that can grab
HDTV over the air and work well under Linux. I own a pcHDTV-5500 PCI
TV tuner card and I am quite happy with it plus the roughly 15 digital
channels it can grab via a roof mounted antenna.

To watch Rogers digital TV you will need a Rogers box somewhere in the
chain. There are I gather a FEW Rogers boxes that can be made to spit
their output out on Firewire. If you can get one of said boxes your
issue will become a good Linux supported Firewire card and getting
everything to talk back and forth.

> And can it be a USB card so it will work with my PS3 running Ubuntu?

You might want to have a look at Silicon Dust's "HDHomeRun" a box with
two HDTV capable tuners and does TV --> ethernet. So, any device on
your home network COULD get TV... The MythTV community seems to think
quite highly of the HDHomeRun and on a per-tuner basis it is fairly
reasonably priced.

> Thanks
> Stephen

Colin McGregor
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