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Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 4:47 pm
by GORDON
Anyone ever use something like this?
http://www.amazon.com/Hauppau...._cp_e_2
http://www.amazon.com/Silicon...._cp_e_0
We have 3 cable boxes in this house, and we pay at least $20 for each of them. I'd love to be able to get rid of 2 of them if I could replace them with one of these devices.
Anyone know what the network architecture would look like? I guess I would need something at each TV able to plug into the LAN, but if that is just a PC running Win 7 and Windows Media Player, then I have 3 older PCs in my spare room that would work.
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 6:00 pm
by TheCatt
Good luck getting cable card to work, and then paying for cable card anyway.
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:14 pm
by GORDON
Trying to research this crap... I can't seem to find any detailed discussions younger than 6 years old. All 2006-ish when the M-cards came out.
Can't search for "cable cards" on time warner's own website, even though the search field auto-fills with "cable cards," "cable card installation," "cable card pricing," etc.... because then in the results field you get every result with EITHER cable, OR (debit) card, etc. Can't put the search field in quotes. So that's worthless.
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:31 pm
by GORDON
Wonder if I can just get one of these devices, hook it up to the network, learn how it works with just the basic cable/unencrypted signal, and decide from there if I want to go the full cable-card route.
I would be able to test:
- Seeing how I can use the device on TVs in different rooms
- See how the channel control/DVR functions work on Windows 7 with actual TV
- See how much of my network bandwidth it uses running 2 channels at once
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 11:43 pm
by TPRJones
It looks like they call them CableCARD on the Time Warner site, perhaps?
http://www.timewarnercable.com/corpora....leCARD-
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:20 am
by Cakedaddy
Network bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Your switch will protect your PC traffic from your TV traffic. That's it's job. But if you are still concerned, buy a second switch and segment your network. If you have one card box hooked to one PC serving all 15 of your TVs, then the network cable to that PC will be hammered. But, it's not hard to find a motherboard with two gig ports on it. It would be a challenge figuring out how to distribute the traffic evenly across the two ports. Your switch won't do it by default. I suppose they might build the intelligence into the motherboard. I've never looked, so I've never seen it. But even if there is logic built into the board, I'm not sure how you get the end devices to participate. The TVs are just requesting content from the IP address it was told to use. So, you'd have to tell your TVs to use the different ports. Or, buy a second switch and manually segment your TV network.
So, the only bottleneck will be if there's one device feeding all TVs. If not, I wouldn't worry about your network traffic.
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:27 am
by GORDON
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:59 am
by GORDON
Looks like it might be possible to access the Win7 Media Center content from the PS3... and other related, networked devices....
http://community.us.playstation.com/thread....start=0