Overview

Support for CableCARD tuners was added to MediaPortal 1.5 Pre-Release. A CableCARD tuner is used like a standard ATSC tuner, except it can decrypt channels.

DRM and Limitations

These days almost all cable TV is encrypted to control access to the content. Some cable providers even encrypt local channels that have traditionally not been encrypted. All encrypted content is labelled with information describing the restrictions. Please see here for more information.
MediaPortal will only support "copy freely" content. This is mainly due to two reasons:

1. The expense of licensing DRM technology or having MediaPortal certified by CableLabs.
2. The conflict between the closed and restrictive nature of DRM and the open and free nature of MediaPortal and our community.

In practical terms that means you may not be able to view or record content from some channels. Exactly which content and channels are accessible depends on your cable provider and how they choose to label their channels.

Description of Change

The user interface for CableCARD tuners is identical to ATSC tuners.

Additional Information and References