My internet provider is Road Runner, which uses, of course, a cable modem. Is it possible to get cable television channels through the Road Runner system and watch on my pc monitor?
My friend says yes, but I haven’t figured out how. My parents also pay for cable t.v. so I don’t think it would be considered stealing the cable signal.
ok heres a boatload of theory and mildy educated guesses from a computer science student and general tinkerer with an academic interest in hardware hacking to help you start looking. !!!if im wrong someone say something!!
with a cable modem (and digital cable) you have a data signal being sent along the cable at a much higher frequency than the normal cable stream. so your modem is likely only ‘tuned’ to those higher frequencies. this means youre ganna get a digital cable signal. you now need to somehow get the modem firmware to send that raw data thru your interface (usb or ether) to your computer. now once its in the computer you have to find the proper program (or at least algorithm) to decode it to some sort of on-screen video.
simple right? the problem is that cable modem firmware is getting harder and harder to unravel and alter (check out back issues of 2600 for info on bandwidth uncapping to get a rough idea). this is assuming that your cable modem is even physically capable of piping that signal down the last few feet of cable.
my advice if you want pctv, is to go sink $40 into a new tv tuner card. the haupauge’ winTVgo has worked well for me.
I watch cable TV on my PC with a TV tuner card. My advice is to get a good splitter too, my cheap one was replaced by the AT&T cable guy when my modem was behaving badly. Then just hook the splitter up, then one line to your cable modem, the other to your TV tuner card.