RCN never replied to the email I sent them over a week ago. Seeing little other choice, I called them to cancel my Cable TV service last thursday. I was, after all, not actually receiving any service, and they appeared to be unable to respond to my inquiries.

After recounting all my troubles in response to the "Why do you want to cancel?" question, the rep apologized, put my on hold for a few minutes, and came back to offer to reduce my bill by $10/month to $95/mo, and include in that price an HD Cable Box.

I was completely astounded by the competency of this rep: she a) didn't argue with me and tell me it was actually the FCC's fault, b) knew what Firewire was and that cable boxes have Firewire ports, and c) knew enough to warn me that she was not sure whether the Firewire port would work or not, ("I know it's enabled in the DVR model but I'm not sure about this one").

Despite the uncertainty about whether Firewire would work or not, I agreed, and set an "install" date for them to drop off the box. So, they came yesterday and gave me a DCH-3200 (man...do cable boxes really need to be that big?). And when I hooked up the firewire cable, MythTV basically just worked. The only way it could have been simpler is if MythTV's manual had been updated to say that most of the junk they want you to do is actually completely unnecessary. Just make sure the kernel modules are loaded, the /dev/raw1394 entry has lax enough permissions, and run mythtv-setup. That's it.

So, while I'm now down from 2 tuners to 1, I still can use MythTV, and despite all odds, RCN has actually managed to redeem themselves to me. After my previous interactions with them, I never would have thought it possible. I'm still irritated that they've made these changes, made them without any notice to me (or any other customer as far as I know), and have terrible customer support, but not irritated enough to cancel my service.

At least until such a time as they start encrypting their Firewire output...all I can do is hope that won't happen anytime soon.

I still feel sorry for people with multiple TVs in their house, the loss of analog channels and encryption of digital channels is gonna hurt them a lot more...

BTW, an interesting post was made to the DSLReports' forum:

>>As of today May 6, 2008, we began encrypting some HD channels in the Massachusetts market and we will continue to do so until all channels are encrypted. This includes High Definition channels that weren't previously encrypted such as local stations. Note the schedule below:

On 05/06/08 we encrypted:
A&E HD Ch 184 , History Ch HD Ch 186, Animal Planet HD Ch 187, Travel Channel HD Ch 188 , FX HD Ch 189 , LMN HD Ch 190, TLC HD Ch 191 , CNN HD Ch 192 and Discovery HD Ch 193.

On 05/14/08 we will encrypt:
HGTV HD Ch182, Food Network HD Ch 181, TBS HD Ch 174 ,TNT HD Ch 173, Comcast Sp Net HD Ch 171,ESPN HD Ch 166 , ESPN 2 HD Ch 169 ,
WLVI HD Ch 156 and WSBK HD Ch 159

On 05/20/08 we will encrypt:
NESN HD Ch 170, ABC HD Ch 160, CBS HD Ch 161, NBC HD Ch 162, Fox HD Ch 163 and PBS HD Ch 164

How does this impact our customers?

* Anyone without an RCN cable box or CableCARD will no longer see these channels.

* Most RCN customers will not even notice a difference. If they have a digital converter or a CableCARD, they won't see any change.
* Customers that have QAM tuners that were picking up unencrypted digital channels without paying for them will no longer see the channels.
o QAM tuners allow the free reception of digital programming previously sent "in the clear" by RCN; however, most digital channels were always encoded because they are outside of the "basic cable" package.
o QAM tuners are only available on high-end HDTV's, and the customer had to know how to set up the tuner to receive these stations. Few people know how to do this, so the amount of customers impacted should be negligible.
o For now, this does not affect a cable ready TV receiving ANALOG cable signals. This is just HD channels. Analog channels will soon be eliminated as well, but that is a future phase; we will send out another notification when that occurs.

+ Beginning July 8, 2008 in Massachusetts; all analog channels except for a constant advertisement will be replaced by an all-digital line up enabling us to put together a great new channel lineup.
+ Customers must have a box on each television by their implementation date or they will lose programming.
+ For new customers, the first standard converter box is free. New customers will be charged $2.95 a month for additional standard converter boxes. Current customers with out any converter boxes, will receive the same pricing. The 1st box free and $2.95 for each additional box.
+ If current customers have a box (RDIGCNV), they will receive additional boxes at the price schedule they are on: $2.95/5.95 OR $4.95/7.95
+ Letters and voice-cast phone messages are directing customers to call a local number, 781-xxx-xxxx, for details.
+ Direct customers calling Customer Service to request a new converter or to swap a converter to the Local Office first

Well, as foretold by my last posting, RCN has started encrypting all their digital channels in the Boston area now. I called tech support to find out the scoop, and was informed that indeed all channels except 2-22 and 93-98 would be encrypted. (those ranges include only the non-HD broadcast channels).

Their codename for this project is "Analog Crush". They almost got it right, if they just renamed it "Customer CRUSH", that'd be about it...If you want to read more people bitching about this topic, there are discussion forums at: AVSForum and DSLReports.

I had a really poor experience talking to their support people on the phone, and followed up with the following email to cabletv@rcn.com. We'll see what they say in reply.

Hello,

I have been a "triple-play" RCN customer since about 2002, and up until now have been entirely satisfied by the services provided. I receive Cable TV via a QAM tuner: <http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun> connected to a computer. Up until last week, I was able to watch your entire "Expanded Basic" lineup, and additionally, the HD versions of the channels available in the Expanded Basic lineup. I was quite happy with this.

However, recently, some of the channels started becoming encrypted. In particular, I seem to have lost FOODHD (181), TBSHD (174), HGTV (182), ESPN2HD (169), NGC (172), WSBKDT (159), WLVIDT (156), LMN (47), and BCTC (85). I am especially surprised that WSBKDT and WLVIDT became encrypted. These are channels that are available free over the air!

When I called up tech support today, they told me that these channels had indeed been intentionally encrypted, and that furthermore, all channels except 2-22 and 83-98 would be encrypted in the near future. He told me I'd need a converter box, for which I naturally expressed my displeasure, and transferred me to Sales to work that out.

When I got transferred to sales, everything went wrong. First of all, the rep was very argumentative, and kept insisting upon untrue statements that displayed a remarkable failure in the training process:
1) That I could not possibly have been watching HDTV channels without an RCN converter box for the last year. He had no idea what a QAM tuner was.
2) That it's all the FCC's fault that RCN is encrypting channels, and that I should not be upset at RCN for making this change.

This was not the start of a good conversation. And even after I tried to express that I wasn't interested in arguing with him, he continued to attempt to convince me I was wrong...Anyways...

As of now, I am a mightily unhappy customer: you want to force me to pay an extra $12/month to rent equipment that I do not want to have, and which will provide me poorer service than what I already had. When I expressed my displeasure to the representative, he essentially brushed me off and told me that I might as well go to another provider.

Additionally, the rep was unable to tell me whether or not your DCT-6200 boxes have firewire output enabled, and if they do have it enabled, whether the output is 5C encrypted or not. (actually, he had no idea that Firewire was even a thing that existed on cable boxes). This is an important point for me in comparison shopping for service. A cable box with a usable firewire output will allow me to connect it to my computer without the purchase of new equipment.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

James

It seems like it's the beginning of the end for RCN transmitting in-the-clear digital channels. Starting last month in Chicago, they have turned off all their analog channels (fine with me), and started encrypting all their digital QAM channels (not fine with me). Apparently this wonderful future will be "coming soon" to their other markets as well.

What this means for normal customers: You need to rent a cable box for every TV you own, whether or not it already has a QAM tuner in it.

What it means for me: I will no longer be able to record TV on my custom built Digital Video Recorder (a HDHomeRun attached to a linux box running MythTV) anymore.

(For reference: currently, their entire basic lineup is broadcast in the clear in analog (SD) and digital (HD and SD))

If this change happens in Boston, I'm not sure what I'll do: encrypted QAM is almost totally useless to me. The approved way of decrypting the signal is by putting a CableCard in your tuner. However, not only do I not have any tuners with a CableCard slot, it's literally impossible to buy a tuner with a CableCard slot which will interface with a computer. I don't understand this: in Europe, the equivalent devices are quite readily available (search for a "DVB card with CAM support"). But not so for a CableCard.

That's not to say such a device doesn't exist. ATI makes a USB tuner with a cable card. It's just that you can only use it if you buy a brand new computer with it. And the brand new computer comes with Windows Vista, and (I guess, not really sure here) some mutant extra-DRMy firmware for the motherboard in the computer to make extra sure you can't do anything with the shows you've recorded. Apparently not even Vista's regular DRM is good enough for protecting cable TV. So, that's right out.

I guess I'll do one of the following:

a) I'm led to understand that it may be possible to get a set-top-box with a Firewire output, and that under some circumstances, the encrypted channels might not be encrypted on the Firewire output. If that's the case, that'd work, although not as nicely as just recording directly off the cable.
b) I could just use an antenna for broadcast channels, and cancel my cable subscription. (and download cable-only programs from the internet. TV shows on the internet often don't have any DRM at all, strangely enough.)
c) Or maybe figure out if it's possible to subscribe to a satellite service in the USA which works with a DVB card. (I think the answer is no.)
d) Or...give up and use the crappy cable box the cable company provides, like everyone else.

PS: I'm quite surprised there's no unofficial decryption software for digital cable streams yet. Or for firewire video streams. But as far as I can tell, there is not. I guess the DMCA is working!

About four years ago, I put together a small linux box with 512MB of RAM, an Athlon XP 1800+, a Hauppauge TV tuner card, a 120GB hard drive, and MythTV. I connected this to my TV with an S-Video cable from the built-in motherboard video, built myself a IR receiver and had a pretty nice PVR.

Of course, over the years, I've upgraded various pieces of the system. I added a DVD drive, and threw out my set-top DVD player. It turns out, mythtv not only makes a better PVR than is available commercially, it also makes a better DVD player than many on the market. Partly because of two "features" it doesn't have: "user-operation prohibited" (aka: You Will Watch These Previews) and Region Coding. But also, it has a good output scaler, the drive doesn't often have trouble reading DVDs, and it doesn't crash as often as my old player did. (yes, that's right, my hardware DVD player crashed more often.)

I've also done some upgrades in support of High Definition TV. I now have a PCHDTV 3000 digital tuner to record the MPEG-2 digital streams (some HD, some SD), a GeForce FX 5200 video card to be able to output the 1920x1080 resolution, and a Infrant ReadyNAS with 500GB (soon to become 750GB) of storage.

Cost is certainly not an advantage this system has over renting a PVR from your cable company. It's been a while, but as I recall, the original system cost me about $600 to put together. All told, the upgrades since then probably cost another $800.

I won't go through the many advantages it has over a cable company PVR or a tivo, but, two of the most obvious are automatic commercial skip and that you can schedule programs via a web server, rather than having to use a remote control. But the most important to me, really, is control. I can make it do whatever I want. I don't have to be limited by the functionality the cable company wants to let me have. I'm no "open source or die" zealot either. But when they're putting the majority of their work into features expressly designed to inconvenience me, it just makes sense to use an open platform.

However, there are two ways I'm quite dependent upon the whims of an external company for it to keep working. The first is the actual cable signal. I'm lucky enough to live in an area in which both RCN and Comcast provide cable service. I'm very happy about that, because RCN provides unencrypted MPEG-2 streams for all the "basic cable" channels, plus a few extras. And that's a pretty good list. I'm told Comcast does not; they encrypt everything except the channels available over-the-air. Now, RCN doesn't broadcast unencrypted by mistake, it is their explicit policy. However, there's always the concern that they might decide to change that policy once CableCards become more ubiquitous. If they did, I'd be in trouble, as it's currently impossible to use a CableCard with linux. This is of course by design (as I'm an evil hacker trying to pay for and watch their content, don't'cha know, can't have that).

Oh, and while in the middle of writing this, I just ran across an article discussing how users of the HD TiVo are also going to be screwed soon, because the HD TiVo doesn't support bidirectional CableCard communication. Why doesn't it? Because the cable company wants to control the entire user interface of any device connected to their network. So much for innovation...

Anyhow...

Another important part of a PVR is the tv listings. If it doesn't know what programs are showing, it's not really usable. While you might think that obviously the TV stations want to disseminate the program listings as far and wide as possible, it turns out, the TV listings aren't actually provided by the stations. They often have no idea what they're playing, other than the absolute basic timeslot data. So, no episode info, descriptions, etc. In the USA, much of that is determined and distributed by one of two companies: Tribune Media Services or GemStar. Of course, my cable company pays one of them for a subscription to the listings, so they can show it to me on the TV Guide channel and the set-top-box TV guide. But do they make the data available to me? Of course not. Luckily TMS has been directly providing a data feed in XML format free for non-commercial use for a few years now. Unluckily, they decided to shut it down, effective September 1st.

Fortunately for me, a number of tv-related OSS developers got together and started a non-profit organization, Schedules Direct, to fill this void. Unfortunately for me, they now charge a subscription fee, to cover the fee that TMS is in turn charging them.

So, now, I'm going to have to pay a subscription fee to get the same guide data that I'm already paying for as part of my cable subscription. The cost is pretty small, but still, irritating.

Why do content companies try to make it so damn hard to pay them for content? I'd be in the market to upgrade to an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive to replace the DVD drive, except, of course, I couldn't use it, because it's currently impossible to play such a disk on an open platform. I'd be willing to pay the cable company for some premium movie channels, except, of course, I couldn't use them, because it's impossible to decrypt them on an open platform. It really boggles my mind.