no one has figured out how to decrypt it. Since I want the premium content I need the cable companies settop box to decrypt it.
So the digital television standard your cable company uses is really DVB-C, but content scrambling is not based on DVB-CA (Conditional Access)? Interesting, what company is it and which system are they using then?
Rogers cable and I am just paraphrasing what I read elsewhere cable ATSC (QAM-256) I have heard from multiple sources that most of the digital channels are encrypted. Also I would not be able to "pay per view" or "on demand" stuff
MythTV seems too big, requires a database and X Mplayer seems too big and requires X VLC seems to big and requires X
Well, MPlayer and VLC are not necessarily that big and I think you can compile MPlayer without X support (or you can install X headers and libraries to compile MPlayer, if it can't be done otherwise). In any case, running these programs doesn't require running an X server. I wouldn't use MPlayer as the primary media frontend though, just as a video player.
I would like to make the system very small.