After a lot of searching and investigation I am going to give up on attempting to get the Elgato system working with Cable and return my unit to the apple store. I think the following is true for the Satalite version in the UK.
1. Telewest will not supply a CAM (I belive Sky will not either)
2. CAMs are locked to the Decoder Box so you can simply extract one from a second hand unit.
3. I think it is against the terms of the contract to attach a device like the Elgato to the cable network.
It is a real shame as the unit does work very nicely for the non-subscription channels - the speed of channel changing and the image quality is great.
I think it could save people a lot of time if Elgato put a sticker on the box advising of this situation / or even better came to an arrangement with Sky / Telewest / NTL etc to get CAMs. To be honest I would be happy to pay a small monthly rental for one if they want to stick to their existing pricing model.
So where do I go from here.
There are a few options....
1. Goto DVB/T - no subscriptions - CAMs are available for pay channels - the down side is that the channels are limited and the quality is low due to poor reception in my area.
2. Get a Infrared controller and an encoder to encode the output from your existing decoder. This would provide a legal and flexible alternative - although the image is now going to have be decoded and reencoded - I am also unsure about the reliability of the IR solutions. Telewest again have made things tricky in that regard.
3. Similar to option 2 - but the Telewest box does have some other interfaces - can it be controlled via RS232 or USB?
I am very intersted in hearing from anyone who has made any more progress in this agrea - or has something working. I do plan to build a Mac based solution - failing that I would do somthing with Linux and MythTV.
Giving up...........
After a lot of searching and investigation I am going to give up on attempting to get the Elgato system working with Cable and return my unit to the apple store. I think the following is true for the Satalite version in the UK.
1. Telewest will not supply a CAM (I belive Sky will not either)
2. CAMs are locked to the Decoder Box so you can simply extract one from a second hand unit.
3. I think it is against the terms of the contract to attach a device like the Elgato to the cable network.
It is a real shame as the unit does work very nicely for the non-subscription channels - the speed of channel changing and the image quality is great.
I think it could save people a lot of time if Elgato put a sticker on the box advising of this situation / or even better came to an arrangement with Sky / Telewest / NTL etc to get CAMs. To be honest I would be happy to pay a small monthly rental for one if they want to stick to their existing pricing model.
So where do I go from here.
There are a few options....
1. Goto DVB/T - no subscriptions - CAMs are available for pay channels - the down side is that the channels are limited and the quality is low due to poor reception in my area.
2. Get a Infrared controller and an encoder to encode the output from your existing decoder. This would provide a legal and flexible alternative - although the image is now going to have be decoded and reencoded - I am also unsure about the reliability of the IR solutions. Telewest again have made things tricky in that regard.
3. Similar to option 2 - but the Telewest box does have some other interfaces - can it be controlled via RS232 or USB?
I am very intersted in hearing from anyone who has made any more progress in this agrea - or has something working. I do plan to build a Mac based solution - failing that I would do somthing with Linux and MythTV.