Tapping the digital sat/cable mpeg stream, How?

[themichael]

Has anybody tried or know of someone that has tapped into the mpeg stream from a digital tuner? This would allow the best captures without converting to analog converting to digital.
And with DVD now in reach of the average consumer........

Mike T

[dphirschler]

It is probably out of your realm of possibilities. Chances are, the mpeg stream is encrypted. Even if it weren't, you are looking at an mpeg stream of 200 or so channels that would need to be split. Also, the mpeg stream is most likely on an analog carrier which probably needs some correction before it can be de-modulated, decrypted, and de-muxed. So, unless your settop satillite receiver box has a digital video output, you are pretty much SOL.

Darryl

[snowmoon]

It's basicly impossible.

There was a Dish Network compatible box that had SCSI out at one point, you could download the MPEG2-DVB data directly and re-mux or re-encode.

There is the WinTV-DVB for terrestrial MPEG2 signals, and it can capture them directly including HDTV. Consitering the number of terrestrial mpeg2 sources it's not worth it.

The sat branded PVR systems are just capturing the mpeg2 for playback later, that's why the ultimate tv pvr can be so cheap, all they are doing is selecting parts of the sat stream already going through the box and saving it to the internal HD. It could probably capture half a dozen channels at once with the proper software upgrade.

So unless you are a hardcore hardware hacker, it's not possible.