I remember when we got 4 local, black and white channels on our TV with rabbit ears. Then it was color, then we got UHF and a few more channels, then there was cable that improved reception and added a few more channels, then at some point we needed a cable box to get some new services, then there was HD, and the switch to digital, and 480i and 1080p, and arghhhh!!!
I just ran the cable to my son’s HD TV and did not add a 2nd cable box. I expected to get some channels, and have others that were encrypted be unavailable. But WTF?
When we scanned we got channels like 12.1; and 17.1, .2, .3; and 18.102; and so on. Channels that are 172 on my old analog TV with a set top box are either not there or have some strange floating point number associated with them. What is going on? I just want to get the Discovery Channel in HD. How hard can this be?
In the long term I want to jettison my set top DVR box from Comcast and replace it with MythTV, but it looks like I need a tuner card with a cablecard, and that costs $299!!
Help.
ETA: I forgot to add QAM, and NTSC, and PAL, and lions and bears, oh my.
cable system in the USA can carry analog and digital channels. you may have a channel 2 as an analog cable channel. if a digital channel identifies itself as 2.1 (also maybe 2.2 and 2.3) then the digital tuner in the tv detects that and it will also show in the channel lineup. cable company could delete or charge for these digital channels at any time in a nondigital package.
take a channel like 2.1 and find that same station in the cable company line up. compare the two, the digital will be much better. also the subchannels x.2 and x.3 are additional content provided by the broadcaster.
not all their customers will get the high cost digital service. you can get in the clear digital signals because you have a digital tuner in the tv set, people with analog tv sets need to rent their digital box to get digital signals. they are likely to lower the price over time as equipment gets cheaper and they transition to all digital service.
They’ve been required by the FCC to support 1 analog TV per home until 2012 for local broadcast. They can meet that requirement either by providing a free digital STB, or continue to carry analog.
And the reason that channels look like 12.1, 12.2 etc is that the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 standards allow for multiple programs to be carried over the same data stream. So the QAM tuner in the STB or TV tunes to a given frequency, and each packet will have a header indicating whether it belongs to program 1, program 2, etc. If you have a cable company STB, it does all the translation for you, so 12.1 becomes 150, 12.2 becomes 151, etc. If you’re just using a QAM TV, it doesn’t know the mapping and just shows the raw program numbers. The cable companies shuffle thing around on occasion as well.
Cable prices go down? :dubious: Did you forget the sarcasm tag?
Sorry to say, but it is somewhat unlikely that you will get Discovery HD without a STB. As muldoonthief mentions, they are required to transmit the local broadcast channels as analog (or unscrambled for HD, I think) but the “cable” channels can be scrambled. I know when I hooked my new HD set directly to the cable there was very little but the basic stations available.