hi folks...
this is getting painful, now....
JL63 -
when you see channels with decimals, these channels are being tuned DIRECTLY by the tuner that is in your Mag DVDR... these represent ' unscrambled ' digital channels that your DVDR can receive. with your Mag in this mode, the Mag tuner is being used, and your external box is NOT being used for anything...
when you change your Mag to look at ' L1 ' ( as an example ), and you have your external box ( SAT or Cable or whatever ) connected to ' L1 ' , you are viewing whatever your external box is tuned to, which can include the wierd higher channel numbers.... these companies ' re-map ' what their channels are so that they look like, for example, ' 400 ' or ' 432 ' or whatever. the companies essentially use ' fake channel numbers ' ... in this mode, you are using your external box to tune the particular channel, and you are feeding the output of your external box into your Mag via the L1 input just to get the video stuff into your Mag DVDR for recording purposes...
sooooooo, for whatever you want to record on your DVDR, it's probably a good idea to learn exactly what the ' decimal ' numbers are, as they might refer to your company's ' fake channels ' ...
as an example, when your Mag tunes to channel 103.1, that might be your external box's channel ' 305 ' ... the reason you would happen to receive that directly on your Mag is because that particular channel is not scrambled.... for the most part, as long as a digital channel being provided by your provider is NOT scarmbled, your mag should be able to tune it, and it will display some decimal channel, even though it might be the same actual channel as one of your company's fake channels that you see when viewing content directly from your external box...
recording directly to your DVDR using the Mag tuner in this case might produce a better quality recording, but then again, maybe not. you need to test this...
for those ' fake channels ' that are SCRAMBLED, your Mag tuner will NOT be able to see those and, as such, you will not be able to record using the Mag tuner by itself.
as an example, you might be subscribing to HBO, or some other premium channel... let's say it is displayed by your external box as channel ' 495 '..
in this case, your Mag cannot receive this particular channel because it is scrambled and, as such, there will be no ' equivalent ' decimal channel.
so if you choose to record an HBO movie, you would use the external box tuned to channel 495, and set your Mag input to ' L1 ' in order to be able to record that movie...
with appropriate wiring, you'd be able to watch one channel while recording another... for example, you might be recording a non-scrambled channel on your Mag, while watching the HBO movie via your external box... this is just an example...
hope this helps a bit...
rgds,
ron g