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Digital TV on Mac Mini, part 1

Thursday 12 March 2009  –  Filed under: Various  –  5 Comments

I’m probably one of the last Mohicans, but I still watch tv on an old 4:3 television set. It isn’t even worthy of calling it a set. It’s just an old CRT tube. Also, I watch tv using the analogue cable signal. No digital High Definition shows for me. Time to upgrade. Let’s go digital and use the new Mac Mini as the viewing and recording apparatus. Sounds easy you’d say, but that’s before I actually started digging around in digital tv, decoders, smart-cards, CAM modules, CI slots, DVB-C/S2/T…

Before I started this venture, I had to ask myself: why would I want to be able to see the same crap (content-wise) at higher quality? Most of the stuff on tv – in the Netherlands at least – is simply unbearable. And overloaded with even more stupid commercials. So why upgrade? Well, using the Mac Mini, I’ll be able to record the things I do like such as Tegenlicht (Dutch). Besides, the digital signal is already on my cable, I just didn’t have the hardware to use it. So the monthly fee I pay to my cable provider will stay the same. Also, the Mac will be used to play music with on our stereo and to watch movies and DVD’s with.

Last question: why post a blog article about this? Because I was amazed about the amount of research that’s required to get this to work if you don’t want to use some of the “suggested” options. Read on and you’ll understand.

Smart-card

To start of, I ordered a smart-card from Ziggo, my cable tv provider. That’s quite an easy process and can be done online. From what I understood from their website, the smart-card is used inside the receiver to decode the digital tv signal. However, I don’t want to use one of their receivers that you can order together with the smart-card, I want to use the Mac to zap channels with and watch the programming guide on etcetera.

Receiver

So, I need a device to receive high definition digital tv with, that is able to be hooked up onto a Mac and is also able to be controlled from that Mac (zapping and recording). At this point I started to encounter the first set of acronyms: DVB-C, DVB-S and DVB-T. These stand for cable, satellite and terrestrial (ether) receivers. As I have a cable subscription, I need something to decode a DVB-C signal with. Besides, the device has to accept the smart-card from Ziggo to successfully decode the signal.

After doing some research, I understood that the Elgato EyeTV 610 is the weapon of choice. However, Elgato stopped making this device. Bummer. Especially since I own an Elgato Hybrid to occasionally watch tv with on my laptop and I was very happy with the zap/EPG/recording software – EyeTV 3 – they provided with it. With the discontinued Elgato 610 being not an option, I returned to Google.

The FireDTV device (pure speculation: it looks strikingly similar to the Elgato 610, perhaps it is a rebranded version of the same thing?)

Digging further turned up a company with the somewhat non-descriptive name Digital Everywhere. They create a device called the FireDTV. This piece of hardware supports the DVB-C format I need and it also supports High Definition transmissions. It uses FireWire (hence the name) to send the video stream to the Mac. Another convincing feature: it supports the EyeTV 3 software for zapping, recording, EPG etcetera. Great. Now let’s see if the Ziggo smart-card needed to decode the signal fits in the FireDTV. Well, it does, but with a little help. Let me explain.

CAM module

The FireDTV supports the so called IC slot. This acronym stands for Common Interface. That doesn’t help much at first sight, but this IC slot can be used to insert the smart-card into. However, the IC slot is not compatible with smart-cards, no, it needs a piece of hardware called a CAM. This even less descriptive acronym stands for Conditional Access Module. The idea is that one inserts the smart-card into the CAM module and then inserts the whole package into the IC slot of the receiver.

Just buying a random CAM won’t work however, because it needs to be compatible with the signal that you’re trying to decode. In Europe, there’s a number of different signal formats (to make things easier I presume): Irdeto, Conax and Cryptoworks to name some of the big players in the market. My cable guys opted for Irdeto, so I need a CAM that supports that format.

At that point, the right CAM module was quickly found though: all forums and user groups point towards the same German made Alphacrypt Classic module. Note that it needs to be upgraded to at least firmware version 3.05 in order to be able to work with the specific signal my cable provider uses.

So now we have a smart-card, Irdeto compatible CAM module and a receiver to insert the card/CAM package into. I ordered all of this and also bought the new low-end Mac Mini with 2 GB RAM, to give t some additional breathing room. I have an existing 500GB external drive currently connected to an Airport Extreme that I’ll probably connect to the Mac directly to store tv recordings and music on.

Next time…

Next episode will be about installing the whole setup after I receive all of the components. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this is gonna work, especially the CAM/smart-card combo. We’ll see!

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