Forgive me if I am blind or something but is there a beginners guide to hooking up a mythbox to a comcast digital box through firewire? I have done a few searches and just found peoples issues or specific questions...but not really sure where to start. Any links would be much appreciated.

Also what would be a good PCI add on card to use for this? I have an older machine I would like to set this up with just to mess around with. I will probably need something better for quality recordings but I just want to try it and see what I can actually have access to through that port on the comcast box before building a system specifically for it.

I can't answer you on hooking your Comcast box. I don't have cable and I have never tried capturing from firewire. I thought there might be a page on the knoppmyth wiki but the only article there didn't look that relevant (or end in success).

But the answer to your firewire PCI question is easy -- just use any 'ol $20 PCI firewire card. The biggest, baddest HD program out there can only muster 20M bits/sec transfer rate which is 1/160 of firewire's capability (400M BYTES/sec). Even the cheapest card won't break a sweat.

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Firewire copy flags are not active in knoppmyth or Mythtv in general. Do a forum search on broadcast flag*. You'll have trouble recording something, sooner or later. A component capture card might be worth considering.

Unfortunately, there's no such thing for high-def. The only "component capture" cards I've seen are actually limited to 480i/p so they're useless for high-def recordings.

Even if you could capture at the component video level, you'd be looking at storing a stream that is 1500M bits/sec (24bits/sample x 1920 x 1080 x 30 frames/sec.) instead of the compressed MPEG2 file at 20M bits/sec. Nothing can deal with that much data.

As far as the "do not copy" flag, it is supposed to be disabled for any content that is not "premium", i.e. free-to-air programming. If the flag is set for any FTA program you can report the cable co. to the FCC for corrective action (like that's gonna ever happen).

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actually a while back I did see a highdef component capture board. I think it was about $10k at the time (and most likely no drivers) so no it's not a viable option.

you may have a problem with firewire at some point in time, and I hear people having problems, but I capture sd and hd through my moto 6200 firewire with comast on a nightly basis and haven't had any problems yet (well they moved the channels around on me once).

As far as a step by step I really can't remember I set mine up over a year ago. As I remember there wasn't much to it. I do know only one of the two firewire ports worked for recording on my stb.

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pugs, did you get your firewire connection working or do you still need some help?

Marc