I wanted to stream TV to my mobile devices and record TV for later, a do it yourself TiVo of sorts. After some research online I landed on MythTV, a fine piece of Open Source software assuming you have the right setup. MythTV is a Open Source project to allow you to turn any computer you want, provided it's fast enough, into a DVR. MythTV runs on major Operating Systems including, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows There are two parts, a backend (server side) and frontend (client), the backend was what I was aiming to set up. The backend does all the work, schedules recordings, handles streaming, and pretty much all you've come to expect of a typical DVR. The frontend is anything you use to interface with MythTV, in my case I used Kodi (formerly XBMC) on my Android phone with a MythTV plugin. All I had to do was find a nice enough computer to run a backend on 24/7 and I was set or so I thought.
I dusted off the old Apple PowerBook G4 that I never really used, it's a little banged up but otherwise good shape. I brought this computer a few years ago from a thrift shop and was pleasantly surprised it powered up, it's a old computer sure but it's fast enough for MythTV and had Firewire. If you have had a HD Cable box in the last 5-10 years there's a good chance it had Firewire and because of the FCC your cable company in the United States at least had to turn it on or give you a new box that had it enabled. Firewire is just a port similar in use to a USB but with some extra features, in this case it allows recording of TV channels you subscribe to from your cable provider. So with this information in hand I loaded the latest Debian Linux 8 for PowerPC on it and off I was, but boy it wasn't easy. Took me days to find out that MythTV had a bug that affected the way it tuned Firewire channels. As noted here https://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/10994 which included information of a workaround. After applying the workaround I finally got a live TV stream to my Android phone! I was overjoyed until I quickly found out "The CW", "MyNetworkTV"(My58 or KQCA as it's known in my area), and all the Spanish channels were the ONLY channels that would tune. The HELL? Here is where Comcast steps in to ruin my day.
The cable box they gave my family is a Motorola DCX-3200. Some searching later and I found the diagnostics mode full of geeky information regarding the box and everything it was configured for. To get to this diagnostics mode power it off using the remote and quickly hit the "OK" button. Powering it off gets you out of the mode. Anyways using this new info I had to do more researching and found out about this CCI or Copy Control Information. A lovely piece of crap that acts more like DRM protection. This means that any open source software cannot legally support it unless that CCI flag is 0x00 like those so few channels I could get to work OR unless you could get an expensive licence to support it like TiVo does for their software. Every other channel I could see has flag 0x02 which means "copy once", content recorded should be deleted after a while, a big screw you to everyone who wants to use this freely. Just because cable companies have to include Firewire doesn't mean they have to make all content freely accessible through it. I might call Comcast and ask if they would ever change the CCI flag, I doubt it but I will update this post if they do.
TL;DR. Works but not really because of Comcast. Not every channel tunes because of CCI. I can get this working by using a USB TV tuner that makes use of Coaxial or Composite output of the
cable box but that isn't exactly HD quality like Firmware would have provided. Maybe I'll try that at a later time.
CITED SOURCES AND MORE INFORMATION
About MythTV
https://www.mythtv.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythTV
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/FireWire
About CCI, Copy Control Information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Control_Information
http://dvr.about.com/od/dvrbasics/a/Understanding-Copy-Protection.htm
About the FCC's ruling on Firewire support
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/FireWire#FCC_regulations
http://gizmodo.com/009313/fcc-requires-firewire-on-all-cable-boxes
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-181A1.pdf
The Firewire ruling might be a bit murky as there was also this
http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/06/fcc-clarifies-ip-interface-requirement-and-extends-deadline-to-2/
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=6017143898
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