docimian :
thats the whole idea behind it. it decodes the encrypted channels, so yes you will get HBo, stars, espn, etc whatever your cable company has. and you will be able to record whatever you please, until they turn on the dreaded copy protection bit/flag/whatever. until then, happy recording!
This could not be more wrong. It is the opposite of right.
First of all, you've got a confusion of terms going on here. You can't decode encrypted channels. You decode streams that are encoded, whereas you decrypt streams that are encrypted.
The cable company sends out all of its digital channels encoded, and the majority of them are encrypted.
Encoding is to save bandwidth. It shrinks the size of the stream that is necessary to provide a decent picture. For instance, a 1080p stream that is encoded with the MPEG-2 codec is 17.8Mb/s. (Megabits per second). Computationally, it is very cheap to decode an encoded signal. It is cheap enough that your cable set-top box can do it on the fly, for whatever channel you are currently watching. A stream that is not encoded (e.g., decoded), is called a raw stream. (It is very expensive, computationally, to ENCODE a raw stream. To do it for HDTV on the fly, as in a live HD news broadcast, requires a commercial device that costs $10,000).
Now, the majority of digital content that you receive is also encrypted. Encryption is there to prevent you from gaining access to a channel that you are not authorized to see. It is very specifically a hostile addition to the data stream designed to restrict access to whatever the cable company has authorized you to have, and it serves no other purpose but to do that. And it does it very effectively, there is no way to break encryption, despite what some people-who-can't-hack-but-know-it-all will tell you. There is no way. You either have the required key, or you don't decrypt.
Your cable box has a key hidden inside of it. The cable man that installed your cable knows what that key is. Suppose the key is 555. (It isn't, and you won't be able to find out what it is, but he knows). When he installed your cable, he called up the boys back at the cable grid and said, "When a device at X address with key 555 accesses the grid and asks for the decrypt key, I want you to give it to that device for these channels that he's paying for, but not for these channels that he's not paying for".
Your cable man didn't make that phonecall for whatever widget you buy off the internet. (Nor will he). Thus it is guaranteed that that widget is not going to be decrypting anything. Indeed, the one in question in this thread does no such thing. All it can do is decode those encoded channels that are sent "in the clear", that is to say, unencrypted.
But wait, you might think, your cable box receives the decrypt key and is now able to decrypt those channels! So why not intercept the stream after it goes through the cable box? The short answer is that this doesn't work. Your cable box can and does decrypt the channels, but it only does so in a very particular way. First of all, it is not sending any decrypted channels through firewire. It only sends the clear channels through firewire. The channels that are asserting encryption will only be decrypted for you when they are being output to a HDCP compliant device. In other words, only sends the decrypted raw streams to particular devices that pass a handshake with it. Those devices are HDCP compliant devices. The only way to pass the handshake is to receive a licensing agreement from a subsidiary of intel to buy a special decoder chip. The only way to receive that licensing agreement is to agree to manufacture products which are incapable of recording the data that they receive unless the data is explicitly flagged as recordable (and nothing is ever flagged that way).
The only devices that it's going to send that decrypted, decoded stream to are basically HDTV's that are manufactured by big-chip TV companies that have signed on to the HDCP program. There is a way to strip out this HDCP using a $200 widget called the HDfury, that is basically a grey-market device available from Europe but technically illegal under the Digital Millienium Copyright Act. Somehow, the manufacturer of HDfury has got its hands of a cache of real decoder chips and that is how they do it.
Anyway, that thing is still not going to be useful to anyone want to recording of encrypted channels, because the cable box has already decoded the stream by the time it gets to the HDfury. The raw stream is far, far too big to be used in recording. It is only useful at the last second, for displaying content on the screen and then being immediately wiped from memory. (The encoded stream is 17.8 Mb/s. The raw stream for 1080p is 1.5Gb/s. That's about 1,000 times larger. Remember, it is cheap to go from encoded to decoded, but expensive the other way).
In short, there is no practical way to do-it-yourself DVR of encrypted / copyright protected digital cable.