O Canada! > Canadian > Shaw > Using Shaw's cablecard outside shaw's boxes?

Using Shaw's cablecard outside shaw's boxes?

I have very much wondered the very same thing. Peter Bissonette was once quoted as saying that Shaw wasn't in the hardware business (that's me paraphrasing), which I took to mean that at some point they'd be cool with selling or renting M-cards to customers. But maybe not.

I wonder if you could put the M-card from a recent Shaw box into a WMC box, maybe clone the box's MAC address to a Ceton tuner or something, and be away to the races?

reply to tlhIngan
Very interesting topic.

I would love to hear more on that. Have not seen much discussion on that here.

I would love to be able to have Shaw digital cable into a tuner card on a PC.

I don't think the box's mac address matters.

Just the CableCARD's ID, cable card doesn't care what it is plugged into.

One issue might be when the 'box' becomes a non-responder.
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

Not possible as the cable card must be paired to the box. There is a binding process, and today only shaw inventoried boxes will work with it. If you take the card out, the data serial numbers change, which deathorizes the card until it is re-binded again.

Not possible to bind the M-card to a Ceton tuner, eh? Must be *technically* possible, since this is what Robert Heron of Heron Fidelity / Tekzilla is doing, down in San Francisco. But Shaw's not allowing it? (Yet?)

Hence why i said shaw inventoried boxes.

It is technically possible, and has already been done, however presently today won't allow it.

Also to answer the question on what type, it is the m card being used, or else gateway wouldn't be able to record 6 channels at the same time.

reply to tlhIngan
From what I've seen, CableCARDs may be "bonded" to the box, but there are many instances where you can just swap them around.

It depends - swapping the cards around (breaking the bond) has varying effects - sometimes nothing at all, other times they lose premium channels (PPV, VOD, HBO and the like), which they don't care about.

There's a trend to just send the customer a card pre-activated and have them stick it in the box.

Worth a try I guess.

I don't have any CableCARD hardware, with the exception of my DCX3400, otherwise I would have tried already.
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

reply to tlhIngan
I'm interested in knowing this too. I'd actually be interested in coming back to shaw if I could use a CableCard. Happy for now with OTA HD and my custom pvr setup... If i could get the 30ish HD channels and continue to use my system... I'd jump on that.

reply to tlhIngan
The other issue is, if the CableCARD works directly into your TV for example, the cable box will then show as a non-responder to the DAC. Which will then eventually get turned off/disabled by Shaw.
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

reply to tlhIngan
From more research on the topic, it seems that cable companies are still looking for the profit margins on the proprietary equipment.

The whole Cable Card standard came as a requirement to CableCO's in the US dating back to 1996 to allow use of customer purchased equipment.

Since then very little non-cableCo hardware was released to work with that standard.
As well it seems that the Cable Industry is actively seeking to switch to a "firmware" type scenario, to further separate the dreams for running a full featured HTPC apart from the reality.

As always Consumers = Dumb
CableCo = So Smart

No PPV/VOD without the cable companies hardware (the biggest reason for Shaw not to give them out).
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

reply to tlhIngan
Naturally, those of us asking for Cablecards don't care for PPV or VOD content. I think we finally threw out some old "free PPV" coupons we got when we bought our first DCT SD box.

I'm guessing ripping it out of the cablebox is probably the only way Shaw would let you get your hands on it.

(I actually have a Motorola M-card sitting on my desk - not from Shaw, but some other cable provider. A lot of US cable companies are giving up on trying to manage them all).

And there are two kinds of cablecards - depending on the equipment your cable provider users. If they used Motorola equipment, you need a Motorola cablecard. If they use Cisco/Scientific Atlanta, you need a Cisco/SciAtl card. All it is is the security part - digital cable is quite standardized, so all a cablecard does is take the encrypted output and gives decrypted output.

The current next spec is Tru2Way gateway boxes - supposedly they stick on the cable input and spit out the video over Ethernet. Tru2way compatible units then just request the gateway box to tune for them and send the video (i.e., very similar to how the gateway boxes work). Except Tru2way boxes other than the gateway are customer owned and can be anything.

Very true that those wanting CableCARDs don't care about the impluse purchases, but Shaw doesn't want to lose out of them just incase.

I was unaware there was actually two different cards, I thought they were all compatable with each others, my understanding for example was that the Pace hardware works on both systems.
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

reply to tlhIngan
As i said before, removing an activated cable card and placing into another box will render the card useless unless you know someone at shaw thst is an engineer and will activate it for you behind the scenes - very doubtful. Even if you were to take it out and put it back in the same box it deauthorizes the cable card as the data sn changes. The dac will not pass the key until the host id, cable card id and data sn are in sync together.

If tou want to try it - not my recommendation, You are just going to end up having to call shaw and getting them to rebind it to your old set top box. Also, activations.shaw.ca won't work as that only initializes boxes and sends refreshes and does not issue a bind. Save yourselves the phone call into shaw, for something that won't work. Plus you open the card slot, you void the warranty.

Consider yourselves warned.

reply to tlhIngan
I would kill for CableCard to work with Shaw. I could build a much faster, more reliable, huge storage, and feature rich PVR than the crap Shaw offers. My 3416 is getting so slow and unresponsive. The guide software is horrible. Now when I set recordings on 249, it records on 26(SD) instead.

I'd like to see the CRTC step up and mandate this.

Check your series recording setup, This Channel, or All Channels.

It will record an earlier timezone if it has the same program, it doesn't care about HD/Non-HD.

That setting should fix that.
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.

reply to kevinds

Of course you can phone in PPV requests on the CableCARD, just as you could before the networks were upgraded to 2-way communication between the cable box and the cable system.

Takes the impluse out of the purchasing however, more hassle (waiting 2-3 hours on hold to authorize a movie for example).

The SOD/VOD application appears to be a little different on most of the boxes Shaw uses, nevermind trying to make one that will run on random TVs that they don't have the specs for.

Also from that Wikipedia article "Currently almost all the retail equipment is not capable of two way communications"
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Yes, I am not employed and looking for IT work. Have passport, will travel.