[Discuss] Verizon FIOS TV and HDHR digital tuner

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

I have an HD HomeRun Prime (the CableCard version) that I am using
with Comcast. I bought it; it's not rented from Comcast. (I also don't
rent a cable modem or router from them.) It took three tries and a
technician visit to get them to activate it successfully. I wasn't
charged for the visit because the self-install failures (twice) were
their fault, not mine. Basically, the people at the office didn't dot
all the Is and cross all the Ts when they did the setup. The
technician managed to get somebody competent to do it right.

Comcast doesn't really support the HD HomeRun at all. Their people
were pretty much clueless about what it even is; all the experience of
their CableCard people was with activating TiVos. I don't think the
company really likes the existence of the HD HomeRun, because it lets
you make DVR recordings in unencrypted formats; it just passes the
transmission stream along to your DVR application which does whatever
it likes with it. (DVR apps generally just record your programs in
standard MPEG-2 files. Microsoft's .dvrms and .wtv file formats, used
by Windows Media Center, are just MPEG with some extra metadata, and
video editing programs will happily open them if you change the
extension to .mpg.) Comcast would much rather have you pay them for
their X1 system which keeps your recordings captive.

I expect that Verizon provides the same level of "support".

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:
> aldo albanese wrote:
>> ...stream files from HDHomerun (a TV Verizon box that
>> stream tv in real time).
>
> Are you saying Verizon actually supplied you with the Silicon Dust
> HDHomerun digital tuner?
>
> I presume that would be the HDHR version with a slot for a CableCard
> descrambler. (Or do you just mean that Verizon supplied the CableCard,
> which you plugged into an HDHR that you purchased.)
>
> I'd be rather surprised to hear of a major cable TV provider offering
> that level of support to those running their own PC-based DVRs. They've
> typically gone out of their way to prevent DVRs from working, and seem
> to begrudgingly supply CableCard descramblers.
>
> What does Verizion charge for the HDHR? (If they are suppling it, I'm
> assuming there is a rental fee.)
>
>  -Tom
>
> --
> Tom Metro
> The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
> "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
> http://www.theperlshop.com/
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