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The cable box, a crucial part of home theaters for decades, might be on the way out. Casual TV watchers say it's easier to find something to watch through online services such as Netflix and Hulu than it is to flip through hundreds of channels in hopes of finding something interesting. Other viewers complain that the boxes are poorly programmed and difficult to use. Even Congress doesn't particularly like the cable box: Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently decried the high cost most customers pay to rent one from their provider.
Cable companies are of two minds about this trend. Some, such as Comcast, are trying to find ways to make cable boxes better. Instead of ugly units with clumsy remote controls, they're scrambling to produce sleeker boxes loaded with software that makes it easier to get straight to TV shows and movies.
Are the cable companies missing the forest for the trees?
(Score: 1) by Rickter on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:00AM
I just bought a Magnivox DVD Recorder w/ Hard Drive (basically a DVD DVR combo machine - to upgrade from and SD to upscaled DVD quality). Then, a few months later, I find out that I'm going to have to have a cable box, which means I'll have to manually change the channels on the Cable box so the DVR can record them while set to channel 4 (I think this is how it will work, I haven't tested this and I'm rather pissed at the cable company for this, and I'm glad I didn't try to spend even more to make a MythTV box).
I'm seriously considering dumping the cable (already called the company a few months ago, and they gave us free basic for a year to not dump the service, only to find out we were getting cable boxes), and going with only Roku, commercial free Hulu, although we may explore Netflix and Amazon Prime. I hope so many people decide that they are so over being jerked around by the cable companies that they do like wise, and we see dozens or more options to get a la carte programing, and anybody can get exactly what the cable company never would give us. Of course, we'll probably continue to see the Internet bill go up to cover the missing revenue that the cable companies will be losing. Google Fiber can't come here fast enough.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:02PM
I'm glad I didn't try to spend even more to make a MythTV box
If you had, you'd plug a IR dongle thingy into a USB or serial port and with some screwing around the mythtv box would tell the cable box what to do to tune as if it were an IR remote control. Three areas of concern, it is easy but unbelievably tedious and time consuming to set up, the stb needs infrared input not bluetooth like a roku or whatever, and the output of the stb needs to be something that your mythtv box can eat, and just because cable connector XYZ is on the back of a stb doesn't mean the cableco activates it. HDCP can be annoying, better do component (the five plugs) or go gray market for something that doesn't care about HDCP.
But, basically, if you had gone mythtv it would work, with some pain and suffering during the implementation of course.
I'm with drussel, I set mythtv up 15 years ago.
On the output / frontend side, I've gone thru at least two generations of hardware, thinking about what the next gen will be, seeing as a rasp-pi should have enough horsepower to be a HDTV frontend, my next batch of frontends might just be pi's in little metal cases.
On the input side / backend side I have video files obtained by the usual technical means, an ethernet attached hdhomerun for locals and the big networks which works perfectly, and a legacy analog tuner capture card for my remaining analog cable channels. A giant full size tower with dual TB drives acts as my file server and backend and capture box.
I worry that the ethernet on a pi isn't fast enough to handle HDMI. Its like USB 1.0 ethernet dongle permanently wired to the on board USB hub, its not very fast.
The biggest problem I have with my mythtv system is I'm not a big TV viewer so its hard to justify spending 5 hours of hobby time per year on something I'll only probably watch 5 hours this month, and I have amazon prime for the free shipping which means I also have free streaming video, more than I'll ever watch. So I download certain youtube videos related to my interests and rarely obtain anime via various sources and pretty much all my other viewing needs are handled by the roku streaming amazon video. I can't remember the last time I watched something I recorded off legacy analog cable. Some times I'll tune around live over the air TV but there's nothing to watch there either. The IQ level of TV seems to have gone dramatically downward over recent decades, there's just nothing left to watch.
The design of mythtv sucks ass. The original audio player was "navigate a directory tree and click to listen" which absolutely rocked and my wife and kids and relatives all loved it, but they scrapped that and replaced it with a hyper complicated DJ scheduling jukebox with queues and randomization and modes of operation and it sucks beyond comprehension and is completely wife and kid proof, so no listening to music off the myth anymore. Also the designers make it as much of an unholy pain in the ass to add external files to the recorded system as possible, what a gang of morons, none the less at great effort running 500 line bash scripts its possible to inject downloaded files into the "recorded" queue, which is pretty awesome when it works. Also they actively oppose RSS / video podcast feeds as a recorded video source, which is nuts. To some extent you can assume mythtv development leadership is basically the old Robert Conquest rule of politics where its out of touch leadership is indistinguishable from a cabal of their enemies. Use it while you can, before they completely finish the job of ruining it.