CableCard-FIOS or Comcast

[skyeclad]

I am moving from CT to Sarasota, Florida and I am considering going back to cable for TV service(OTA at the moment). I have 2 options at my new address: FIOS and Comcast Xfinity.

If I went this route I would like a 4 tuner cable card solution that allows me to use SageTV as a server and my extenders. I would prefer not to have to move to WMC as a solution.

I heard that Comcast allowed Copy Freely which is necessary for Sage Server support. Not sure if I am correct in this.

Then the question of Ceton or HDHR Prime. I would prefer 4 tuners so the Ceton would be the more obvious option but my brother in law has had problem on Media Center with his Ceton so I was leaning toward maybe 2 HDHR Prime's.

Any advice?

[ckewinjones]

I have no advice but I will share my experience.

I've been using the Ceton InfiniTV4 tuner card for several years now. The first year or so I used it with Comcast (they didn't use the XFinity branding back then but it's the same service. Then we switched to Verizon FiOS and I continued to use the Ceton card in my SageTV setup.

With both providers, the CableCard / Ceton / SageTV setup was very straightforward, and the setup has worked with very few problems for years now. Every once in a while (meaning maybe twice over the years I have used this setup) the Windows service that drives the Ceton card has hung and had to be re-started. And once the rather tiny connector that connects the coax from the cable provider to the Ceton card snapped and I had to RMA the card. Ceton were very nice about it and delivered the replacement card very promptly. Those are the only problems I have had with this configuration.

Between the two providers I prefer FiOS to Comcast, not for anything related to SageTV or TV content generally, but simply because they deliver more internet bandwidth at a better price. For us, FiOS delivers almost every channel Copy Freely, except for premium channels (HBO, etc) which we rarely watch. I have an HD PVR unit which I could set up for SageTV to use with premium channels, but in actuality on those rare occasions when we want to watch something on a premium channel we just switch to our FiOS set-top box and watch it outside of SageTV.

However, neither provider has a company-wide policy as to which channels are marked Copy Freely vs Copy Once or Copy Never. It depends on the individual market area. So you simply have to check what the situation is in your particular area. In general FiOS has the reputation of having the most Copy Freely channels, but that is no guarantee that this will be the case where you are. In our experience there was no difference when we switched from Comcast to FiOS.

Good luck!

[skyeclad]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I'm glad to hear that the Ceton works well for you. Would you happen to know how I could go about finding about the Copy status for either of these companies? Something tells me that the sales reps on the phone won't have a clue of what I'm talking about or worse, may give me incorrect information.

[ckewinjones]

Unfortunately the only reliable way I know is to query the cable network after the service is already installed (either from the diagnostic menu of the cable company's set-top box, or from the configuration utility that comes with the Ceton InfiniTV4). There are some places on the Internet (such as here; you can Google "comcast CCI" or "FiOS CCI" to find others) that claim to list which cable providers copy-protect which channels. But how reliable and up-to-date these lists are is anybody's guess.

You are quite right that the sales reps whom you deal with for pre-sales information will be totally clueless, and in my experience the front-line technical support representatives will be no better. It is possible if you send an e-mail to their technical support and ask them a very specific question using the correct terminology, you might get a substantive answer (I'm thinking of something like "what is the value of the CCI byte for ESPN on your system? Is it 0x00 (Copy Freely), 0x02 (Copy Once), or something else?"). If you get a meaningful answer, then perhaps you could send another e-mail (directly to the person who gave the meaningful answer) with a list of all of the channels you really care about, asking for the CCI byte values for all of them.

It has to be said that that is a long shot. Good luck.

[Naylia]

Comcast has a national policy of Copy Freely for all non-premium channels and they seem to be following it. Their CableCard service advisors have gotten much better over the last few years. I RMA'd my Ceton tuner for the connector problem mentioned above (the new connector on it seems more robust), and when it came back I had to contact Comcast and they were much better and more efficient at doing a CableCard setup over the phone than in the past.

I have no experience with Verizon, but I have heard they are also good about Copy Freely. It's Time Warner and a few of the regional providers that are screwing around with the flags a lot. For Cable Card setups, you probably have the two best alternatives on the market available to you.

[MattHelm]

My dad is on Comcast, and he has 2 or 3 non-premiun channels that are NOT copy freely. Small town, no one in the local office, at a guess, could turn on a TV without help.

[reggie14]

As Naylia said, both Comcast and Verizon are pretty good about marking non-premium content (basically, everything but HBO and the other movie channels) as copy-freely. There's no particular reason to think that's going to change, but there's not much stopping them either.

I wouldn't trust anything a sales rep tells you over the phone, so the only way to be sure the local office hasn't gone against the national corporate policy is to check the copy protection flags using the diagnostics menu on a STB, or using a CableCard tuner.

I've had Comcast and Verizon FiOS in the DC area, and both have had everything except premium channels marked copy-freely.

I use a SiliconDust HDHR Prime. I find that its easier to use a network tuner than a PCIe tuner, though there's advantages to internal tuners too. I haven't had any problems with my HDHR Prime, though.

Backing it up, I still use one of my HD-PVRs for recording premium channels. My HDHR QAM tuner is still hooked up too, but if Verizon moved around the QAM channels I'd probably just pull it. I don't think I'm ever recording more than 3 things at once.

[mistergq]

I have FIOS and cable card. Sometime in the past 9 months, Verizon encrypted HBO and Cinemax. Showtime and TMC are still copy freely. the only channel non-premium movie channel that I choose not to go through the Cable Card is NFL Network and NFL Red Zone. On game days, I think they increase the broadcast quality and the HD200 cuts off the top and bottom of the screen. So I have those channels go through the HDPVR. This seems to be an HD200 issue not a Cable Card issue because it plays fine on Sage Server and Sage Client.

Every 4-7 months, I have reupdate the channels because tuning changes. I also just recently lost many channels for about 72 hours, and then they just reappeared.

Overall, I love the cable card. I am disappointed about the HBO and Cinemax issue. I was about ready to shut down the HD PVRs when Verizon encrypted HBO and Cinemax. Also, with a infrequent reliability issue, I like having the redundancy.

[skyeclad]

Well I guess I'll just pull the trigger on the choice that offers me the best price and service offerings. Just so that I'm prepared, do I need to use SageDCT or something to connect to the cable card tuners?

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by skyeclad

Just so that I'm prepared, do I need to use SageDCT or something to connect to the cable card tuners?

Yes. You'll need to use SageDCT to make you cable card tuners visible to SageTV.