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TV tuners, cable box etc.

S

stuckinasquare3

Senior member
I have Cablevision cable (NY) and recently they switched to digital cable and now I need a cable box to see any tv. What is it that the cable box is actually doing? I'm looking to build an HTPC and stream cable over the internet. If I buy a tv tuner that says it has a QAM tuner, do I still need a cable box? Is the signal being scrambled and the cable box unscrambles it? I'm new to this
 
They *may* encrypt the channels. If they do, your ability to tune in clear QAM will likely only get you local broadcast networks. My local cable company formerly did not encrypt and my computer's digital tuner could tune in all my channels. Then the cable company encrypted everything but broadcast. I'm a sad panda. I'm also planning on dropping cable altogether since I can no longer easily record and watch the way I want to.

To tune/record encrypted cable channels you need a cablecard tuner and a card. The tuner is quite expensive and options are few. The card rental is pretty dang cheap from the cable company.
 
If I have a cablebox, do I need a tv tuner card that supports QAM, or just ATSC? I'm pretty sure all my cable is scrambled and I need the cablecard to descramble it. So since the cablebox exists already, then the ATSC tuner should be all I need right? Afterall, all the older tv's in my house that are connected to that cablebox surely don't have QAM tuners.
 
My cable box only outputs one channel at a time. I suppose it's probably possible to hook the cable box output to a computer and have one of those IR dongles that let your computer change the channel on the cable box... But I don't have experience with that.

Are all your TVs connected to a single cable box and you can still tune them independently to whatever channel you want? That seems ... odd.

Pre-encryption of my cable company's channels, I could just hook the cable into a digital tuner (either a TV that could tune digital channels or any other digital tuner) and get all the channels without a box from the cable company. I could use a cable box thingy and they sent one with a crappy DVR that also allowed pay per view and stuff, but it wasn't required. After the encryption began I needed a box for every tuner.

I don't know of any cable TV cases where you have all TVs hooked up to a single box. I'm not an expert though.
 
It is possible to connect the cable box output to a PC using component output from the cable box and an IR blaster to control channel changing. Hauppauge makes the HD-PVR for that purpose. They also just announced a new internal card that has an HDMI input and which can process an unencrypted 1080i signal. There's not much info on its capabilities yet though so nobody is too sure if will function like their HD-PVR.

btw, the card in your cable box may not be a CableCard. It may be an authorization card but it's hard to say without seeing pictures of it.

Currently the only way to run cable directly through your PC is to have a Ceton InfiniTV card with a M-card CableCard installed in it.
 
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