[Ryoga79]

Hi all, i'm trying to get the most up-to-date information on the status of PVR support with digital cable at the moment. I currently have FIOS tv service through verizon in the DC area, and am looking to buy a HDHomerun Prime with CableCard support. I've seen a bunch of conflicting information on this (and other) forums, as well as with my own google searches, so i figured i'd just ask directly: does anyone have experience with PVR/HDHomerun and FIOS? Can i yank the cablecard out of the box and put it into the HDHR prime, or do i need to get a new one? Does it work at all? I've seen posts about verizon changing the flags on channels and that possibly effecting third party boxes, but i'm not really clear on what any of it means. I figure before i make the financial investment in the PVR hardware, it'd be good to know what i'm getting into.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide.

[lockdown571]

From what I understand cable cards are tied to a specific device, so you would need to get a new one. Moreover, XBMC cannot display copy once material. The only software that can play copy once material is Windows Media Center. I think there's a workaround using a Hauppauge Collosus with your cable box, but it's a bit messy.

[twojciac]

I am running HDHR clear QAM as well as an HDHR Prime for encrypted, for a total of 5 tuners, with mythtv as a backend and it works wonderfully.
I am able to watch and record EVERYTHING, including Showtime.

You have to have a M-card cablecard, not the older single stream cards. I successfully yanked mine out of my TIVO and put it in the HDHR Prime and it worked right away. As far as Clear QAM, with the regular HDHR, straight cable feed in and I can get all of the OTA channels and local access channels unencrypted. Since 50% of what I record is on the major OTA networks, that frees up 2 tuners for encrypted content, and I found a used HDHR on eBay for like $60.

Oh, and I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth market... so it's possible things are different in the DC market.

[lockdown571]

That's really unusual that a cable provider would flag shows on channels like Showtime as copy freely. I know Verizon used to flag everything as copy freely, but this has changed. You are definitely lucky. Some cable providers flag almost everything as copy once, although it varies from region to region. Comcast is pretty good for the most part. None of the channels I subscribe to have copy once programming, although I don't get the movie channels. As I understand it Comcast generally marks those as copy once.

Even if you are currently getting all programming, your cable provider could at any moment change their mind and start marking things as copy once. This happened to a lot of FIOS customer. So I wouldn't setup a long term solution on the assumption that all your programming will remain copy freely.