Why do I need an encoder?

[ChrisNH]

Forgive me for being obtuse, my cable company is going to encryption this month and until now I have not followed this.

I purchased an HDHomeRun. I don't have a cable card yet because they are not encrypting until 9/28. For now I am using it as a digital tuner.

I followed the directions and now I have both Silicone Dust and DCT tuners. Is Sage able to work without an encoder now? Is the encoder needed when I get a cable card? Am I confused about something (yes)?

This is a sage box I put together in August with the latest version if Sage 9x.

I am just trying to understand the purpose of the encoder in the Sage ecosystem.

Thanks!

[ChrisNH]

Looks like it is because sage won't support cable card. It will work now because I don't have a cable card..

Sorry for the wasted bandwidth.

[KryptoNyte]

Just get a HDHomerun Prime (if you don't already have it) and a cablecard and then install OpenDCT from this thread;

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62774

Many of us are using this solution (unless you are currently with Time Warner). What is your cable company?

[ChrisNH]

Metrocast (New Hampshire). Channels will start being encrypted 9/28. For now I am just trying to get it work with regular QAM.

OpenDCT (with HDHomerun Prime) is what I have installed. I am troubleshooting a problem where it is slowing down on my HD300, I am going to try the beta release next. May be a network issue, will try to get sage working locally to verify.

ed: Beta fixed performance issue, or maybe last time I just didnt give the initial command line run enough time to finish setting up. In any case, existing Sage stuff working fine although I still can't tune channels on the HDPrime on Sage.

[EnterNoEscape]

OpenDCT doesn't have a lot of ClearQAM support when a CableCARD is not present on at least one of the discovered devices. That might be most of the issues you're having. I would need to make some changes in the code to support normal scanning and mapping for ClearQAM, but if you're going that route, you should be just as well off using SageTV natively instead.

[ChrisNH]

Thanks... I will table OpenDCT until I get a cable card. I just didn't want to be "under the gun" having to quickly get that working after they turn on encryption.

The sluggishness I experienced before has come back too so I will uninstall to remove that as a variable.