Fun for the Whole Family

Last night, we couldn't get more than channels 2 to 13 even when we try to set the tuner card in cable mode. Maybe we need to set it to analog mode too? Blah.

My son connected the cable to the cable DVR box and the cable from that to the TV Tuner card in the PC. This allows us the ability to set the TV tuner to channel 3, and use the cable box to change channels.

We then notice that there's a 3 to 4 second delay between what gets displayed on TV, and the sound played directly from the cable DVR box. Of course! The TV tuner card takes some time to capture the image and send it to the monitor. We think everything might get cleaned up once we connect the cable to the antenna we have on the roof.

Another fun fact we discovered. We originally had an antenna, then we got DishNetwork. When we did that DishNetwork used the cable from the antenna for the Dish. This created a bit of a problem since the TV upstairs (we hadn't mentioned that one yet. Did we?) was now getting input from the satellite dish and the antenna. My solution was to go on the roof and cut the cable. After all, we didn't need the antenna any more.

Now, I'll have to go back to the roof and reattach a coaxle cable to the antenna. Fun. Even worse, we now realize we simply can't unplug the cable and plug in our antenna because we still need the cable for Internet. Fortunately, Optimum recently rewired our cable to provide a direct connection between the cable modem and the cable. Before, we were connected to the cable modem with three coaxle cable splitters. Now, it's just one. We can reroute the antenna wire through the basement, to the splitter, and simply remove the wiring for the TVs from the cable.

Also, thanks to the Republicans, we now have a deadline in getting all of this to work. Come February 15 or somewhere around that date, our house is going digital whether we like it or not.

I looked into getting Tivo. It's $300 for the unit and $13 per month for the Tivo service. We originally didn't go that route do to the price. Maybe it would have been cheaper...