The "compatibility issue" is not really that. You can use a standard DCII IRD with ethernet and ASI output and feed it into the IS2. The output is ASI which has to be feed into a groomer. Grooming is basically transcoding, because Crapshat loves to feed HD lite to it's customers instead of HD, so they groom the bitrate to reduce it, so they can fit 10000 channels onto an already limited and/or poorly design infastructure. I know with the original Intellistar, it came with a Motorola DSR-4520 Digicipher II IRD. It would output SDI (Similar to DVI, you could say) and multicast IP data via it's ethernet port. The output on the Intellistar would be SDI video with audio, composite video, with analog audio, local avail triggering, etc. The SDI output would connect to a groomer or MPEG2 encoder for feeding into another groomer or multiplexer, then onto the QAM plant. Basically, Crapshat are either idiots, or cheap, but I would have to agree with both.
