First off, this is a great article – very useful info for anyone new to the space and I have yet to find a decent consolidation of this info! A few comments:
[url=http://www.169time.com/]16:9 Time[/url] is another option for modding your satellite receiver with a firewire port. Support is the same as any firewire option – SageTV with the [url=http://www.nolberger.se/Sage/GraphRecorder/Default.htm]Anders Nolberger sgraphrecorder plugin[/url] and MCE with the [url=http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/wsb/html/view.cgi-showresources.html-TopRes-STB-20Firewire.html]timmmoore plugin[/url]. One of the downsides of firewire capture with MCE is you still can’t watch live TV in HD and it requires you to have a regular TV Tuner. Those issues do not exist when using firewire cap with SageTV.
By the way, curious to know why you list firewire capture as “the most expensive on the market”? If you’ve got a firewire port on your PC and a set top box with an active firewire port it’s essentially free! Not including the many hours/days/months you are likely to spend getting it working properly of course…
On the “ease of tuning”, it might be a little tricky to get channel changing working properly with firewire but, once it’s setup, I’d say it’s much more reliable than IR blasters. Perhaps you should include reliability of tuning as another rating?
One final comment on the “ease of tuning” for cablecard rating – I think you are seriously over-rating the simplicity of this. I’ve setup about six cablecard systems to date and have yet to take it less than two weeks for the cable company to get activation right. In some cases (Time Warner in New York City) I was never able to get two tuners working reliably. In this case, we were using HP systems and after over a month of troubleshooting we finally replaced the HP’s with Tivo HD’s and sent the HP’s back.
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