Here is some information that may or may not be useful
depending on your setup. There is a company called
Silicondust.com which makes a line of products that turn either
cable or over-the-air TV in to something called a DLNA stream
which is available on your home network for any device on it that
can receive it.
My appletv is a Generation 4 unit so I can't speak about
the older devices but here's what I found out so far.
On your appletv, go to the AppStore and install the vlc
video player. The price is right, free!
When you run it, you will have 4 options in Settings and
one of them is to get the TV from your network and it will see
any Silicondust devices present in your subnet.
I currently have a Silicondust cable TV box called a
Silicondust HDHomerun_prime which will receive unencrypted cable
TV channels right out of the box and, if you rent a "cable card"
from your cable company, it will also decrypt those channels.
There is a card slot on the back of the HDHomerun_prime
for a cable card.
For now, our cable company does not encrypt many channels
so we get about 100 + channels and a bunch more encrypted ones.
Many other cable companies encrypt them all so your
HDHomerun_prime will require a cable card to get anything.
Assuming you get your HDHomerun_prime talking on your
network, you can run vlc on the appletv and select to get your video
from your network and you will see your Silicondust devices and
receive any channel including descriptive video if present by
clicking on the channel number.
I tried a few channels just yesterday and they all came
in loud and clear.
Now for the accessibility issues. You can use safari on a
mac or any other modern browser to look at the Silicondust
devices, themselves to get lists of channels and, by running an
application from Silicondust, you can even read a rather cryptic
summary of a listing of each channel, it's name and even signal
strength along with other parameters.
In your case, you will need a cable card for the premium
channels or maybe for all channels depending on how your cable
provider is setup.
Since I am an amateur radio operator and general
experimenter, I have both the Silicondust HDHomerun_prime and the
HDHomerun_extend. The extend is like a smaller version of the
HDHomerun_prime made for connecting to an outside antenna and
receiving over-the-air signals. As far as your computer or
appletv goes, you see both Silicondust devices and can watch TV
from either one.
The electronic characteristics of cable TV and
over-the-air TV are incompatible with one another so a
HDHomerun_prime is useless on an antenna and a HDHomerun_extend
won't see a single channel when hooked up to cable. Neither box
works on analog channels so it's digital or nothing.
When using your appletv and vlc, I was able to select the
two audio channels that most services provide. They are sometimes
mislabelled but you can sure listen to them.
Our cable system has CNN, for instance and there are two
audio programs, one is the usual English feed for North America
and the other, marked Spanish, is mostly silent with bursts of
telephone-like dialing tones that begin and end each commercial
block. During the commercials, the soundtrack for some
commercials comes through normally and others are silent like the
program, itself.
Turner Broadcasting has Descriptive audio in the evenings
and other channels do put Spanish on the track labelled as
Spanish, imagine that!
I also have A hdmi to analog converter and you could use
one of those if you already have a cable box that has no ananlog
out jacks for a stereo.
The hdmi converters can be had for about $50.
I know this is a lot of information so sorry if it is
confusing.
The Silicondust products are in the $120 to $150 range so
they aren't terribly expensive but you need to be sure that they
would work for you.
Mary Otten <motten53@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
Apple viz. recently published a podcast done by Lisa Sullenger on this************
topic. She mentions a specific HDMI to audio converter that she used with
her stereo. The one thing she did not touch upon in her podcast has to do
with an issue that has been raised on these lists before regarding the
usability of this system with video content that is protected. I can't
remember the name of the specification or coding or whenever it is
involved that must be seen in order for the AppleTV to pick up the
content. Generally, if the AppleTV is not connected to an actual video
output which is actually turned on, you can't get a lot of this protected
video content. So I am wondering about this system with this particular
converter. Has anyone used it or any other converter connecting AppleTV
fourth-generation to a stereo with no TV present and still able to
receive the full complement of all the video channels, such as Netflix,
HBO etc.
Mary
Sent from my iPhone************
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