I didn't see any replies to this, so here are my two cents, for whatever
they're worth. I'm assuming you're in the US for purposes of this
discussion. If you are not in the US, my apologies, but I am not familiar
with international television systems. As it turns out, I just did some
research on this very subject.
On 9/23/2015 6:16 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
That's the whole message in the subject line. I want to come up
with a DVR solution for us that is accessible. My wife is
sighted so I hope to put together a system that will schedule
recordings and have speakup available so I can tell what is going
on.
Well, according to the 21st Century Video and Accessibility Act, (CVAA) the
FCC has required all set top boxes to be accessible fairly soon. I think by
the end of 2016, but I'm not positive. Therefore, a better option might be
to wait and buy an actual DVR, like TiVo. Comcast already has a very
accessible option from what I here. That said, there are Linux solutions,
but they don't work with Speakup. Specifically, they require X and may or
may not work with Orca. There is a screen reader in early development, but
it doesn't seem to be officially packaged. The two packages are:
mythtv
kodi
If you go with Kodi, it's recommended to install it on a dedicated machine,
but not necessary. Kodi does let you schedule programs and has a screen
reader in early development. I recommend, as does upstream, to add their
official repository to Ubuntu rather than relying on the shipped Debian and
Ubuntu packages.
A lot of what makes a tuner card work or not is whether
or not the drivers exist in Linux. If they exist, then everything
can be made to work. If not, you've just got another expensive
warm brick.
Yes, there are definitely USB tuners, so that shouldn't be a problem, but it
is no longer that simple. See below.
Our cable system went totally digital in August so in
order to make our old Zenith VCR work, one must put an
analog-to-digital converter ahead of it and this effectively
renders the VCR's ability to select a channel useless since there
is only one channel in it's world, now and that's whatever the
output of the converter box is set to.
Ah, well that's the rub. The problem is that you must have a special tuning
adaptor provided by your cable company and you must have a PCI card which
goes in your set top box. I've done extensive research on this and can
provide links proving my point if necessary. In short, the standard is
called Switched Digital Video or SDV. You can read the Wikipedia article
for the details. Basically, it's another form of DRM. The digital channels
have some form of encryption which must be decoded by the provided tuning
adaptor. Your cablecard talks to the tuning adaptor telling it what channel
you're currently watching. Therefore, don't buy a card because it won't
work. It needs to be a two-way card which can send (to the tuning adaptor)
and receive the decrypted signal. Even if you found a USB tuner that works
with Linux, you would still need the PCI card and tuning adaptor. The
tuning adaptor is also USB, but it's anyone's guess if it works with Linux
or not. The same goes for the PCI card. I'm sure your cable company won't
help you; at least that seems to be the common experience on the forums.
I'm afraid I don't have any good answers for you except what I said above.
Either get the Comcast solution or buy a DVR in a couple of years after the
law is supposed to be enforced.
If there is a DVR that does talk, I am interested in that
but, failing that, I want a tuner card that works with Linux and
that should get us going. Many thanks.
The only two I know of are Kodi and Comcast with the X1 (X-1?) operating
system. If you do figure out a better solution, I would also be very
interested. The other option, probably not to your liking, is to grab as
much as possible online. Lots of TV shows are available online and aren't
too hard to grab with programs like youtube-dl.
http://yt-dl.org/latest/
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