Phoenix, AZ - HDTV - Page 17

Brandon if I understand your question you're more worried about the college football package? When I moved her 8 months ago I got Cox b/c the cost upfront were less. They do have the college football package if that's your concern b/c I got it when I was with them. A month after being here I saved up some coin and got Directv. I order the CFB package and I have a standard def Directivo. I don't have an hd settop box b/c I my tv has a built-in hd tuner so I watch OTA hd. I don't know about connecting a SD Tivo to a hd stb if that's what you're asking b/c I never done it.

First, hello all you AZ people. Now then, I live in Mesa, AZ and I am only able to get cable service from Cable America. Does anyone else have them? I am interested in there HD but right now I have the Lg LST3510a hdtv receiver and it has QAM so do I need one of their boxes? If my LG will work what channels will it pull in and what level of programing must I subscribe to? They want to charge $16.00 a month for the box and that seems a little high. Just thought I would ask.

antennaweb.org At this site enter your address and zip, and it will tell you what channels you will receive, including HD.

HTH,

Rich

Hey everyone. I'm still a little confused about how I would hook TIVO up with DirecTV if I have two seperate boxes, one for HD DirecTV and one for TIVO. The only solution I thought of that would not hurt HD PQ at all would be to hook the HD DirecTV reciever up seperately from the TIVO DirecTV reciever and then switch back and forth between two sources if I want to record. However, that is a pain in case you are just watching a program and want to pause real quick. Is there another solution to be able to use TIVO and DirecTV together without losing PQ when watching TV (I don't care much about recording quality)

AFH - Do you like DirecTV better than Cox? Do you rememeber how much the college football pacakges were and if they both included the same games? So do you only recieve HD locals, no ESPN or HBO in HD since you are using an OTA? My TV has a built-in tuner as well, but I wanted to be able to recieve all HD channels available, not just local.

Thanks,
-Brandon

I would just use the connection method you described above. I don't how the pq would be effected if you used another connection method. I don't know if the Directv hd rec has an S-video output that you could connect to an S-video input on the Tivo. If there you could use that method for sd recording.



See, the thing is that I've used DTV since I was in grad school so I like what they offer. Cox was good enough and if you don't have the money to sink into DTV at the beginning it or Dish Network is a good alternative. That being said, the only problem that I had with Cox is I could not get the DVR to record my shows on a regular basis. I don't know what the problem was and I even spoke with the CSRs about this numerous times. I think that the DVR that I had was hit or miss. I don't know how it is now. The other thing is that I have been using Directv rec's with Tivo built in since Nov of 2002 so I was used to that.

The CFB packages were the same price, but I got the package from Cox after the early bird special. This year I'll have DTV renew it automatically so that I can get the early bird deal. I believe the price for the early bird deal is 88 dollard and 99 if you do it after the early special. As far as the games are concerned, I believe that I got about one or two more games with DTV than with Cox but don't quote me on that. I can tell you that the games available in the package looked much better on DTV than they did on Cox. Why that was the case is still a mystery to me. Being here in Pac 10 country, the package is good b/c I get to watch ACC and SEC football, specifically Florida State.

The only thing that pisses me off about the CFB package is that the 12:00 pm EST games tend to run over into the 3:30pm EST ACC games. Therefore, you normally miss about 5-10 minutes of the start of the 3:30 game. The Big 12 nor Big 11 games didn't have that problem as frequently as the ACC games. I believe that was b/c the ESPN+ game would run on the same channel as the 3:30 ACC game. Also, and I believe they corrected this problem b/c of this incident, but the early season 8:00 pm EST games would get cut short when OT happened. That was the case with the Clemson v. Georgia Tech game. These problems were a result of the ESPN/ABC people who run the package, not DTV or Cox.



Yes, I only rec hd local via my OTA. The thing with me is that I don't see the need to pay for DTV's hd package b/c there is nothing in the package that I would watch on a regular basis to justify the cost. I sub to HBO for now, but I don't want to watch the hd version of HBO b/c the movies aren't in OAR and if HBO isn't going to show the hd movies as they were meant to be shown I'm not going to give my money to DTV for that.

When I was with Cox I didn't get the hd rec b/c like with DTV I didn't see the need for it seeing as how I rec my hd channels. For me, having hd locals is my most important concern b/c the network shows that I watch are in hd and my antenna is free. The shows that I watch that aren't in hd are recorded onto my Directivo.

I currently have Cox Digital HD, 8300HD DVR, Internet and phone. My wife if going back to school full time, so we are cutting expenses so she can reduce her work hours. We are considering dropping the cable TV and just keeping the Internet and phone, and put up an antenna for OTA. That means I am researching antenna choices. I live at 31st Ave. and Deer Valley Rd., 25 miles from South Mountain with no obstructions.

Antennaweb lists a small multidirectional for most channels, a medium multi for a couple others, and a medium directional for ABC (because of their higher frequency?). TitanTV lists excellent reception with almost any antenna I choose.

I would like to install in the attic, if possible. The south side of the house is wood siding, but the attic vent has metal louvers and a mesh screen. From a vertical space perspective, mounting in front of the vent is the best, but I think I might be able to put a smaller antenna off to the side of the vent. Question is whether it would be far enough in terms of wave length, etc. I doubt it, and expect some interference either way. The question is how much? Do you have to ground an attic antenna?

Normally, if the antenna is outside you would ground it thru a grounding block. The problem you will encounter in the attic is the large of amount of metal up there that will cause interference. As far as how much, it varies from person to person.

OK....i have the sa 8300hd box.....i have read a little bit about it...i would like to download the data from the HD in the 8300 to my PC...i contacted cox so many times but got no where with them they won't even acitivate the 1394 ports....i have gone as far as takin the hard drive out of the 8300 and connecting it directly to my pc but.....my computer would boot and start to load windows and show the drive but then restart or freeze up...for some reason after i took out the drive..my computer continued to restarted while windows was loadin..i did a system restore in windows and it fixed the problem...has any one been able to plug the HD from the 8300 directly to the pc to get the data...lemma know ASAP......if it help's my PC is runnin XP pro...um plz some one help me..email me anything .....i'm going crazy here

There is no way to get the programming from an 8300HD into a PC. Firewire is only enabled on the 3250HD, and the hard drive has protections in place to stop you from just sticking it in a PC and copying the data over (besides the fact that opening up a set top box that doesn't belong to you is a really stupid idea).

i heard their is a way of getting around the protection on the hard drive..my computer regonized the drive when windows was loadin..but that's when it started to lock up...and i'm just askin questions i don't crap..if you can't answer the question plz don't repley

They did answer your question...

1394 is not enabled on the 8300HD...period. Can't do it.

There is no known way to remove the encryption on the 8300HD. There is possibly a way to add external SATA drives but that is about it.

then why do the box in san diego have the 1394 ports activated as well as SA sayin that it is up to the Cable company to unlock the ports...i guess i need to find a COOL tech at cox..i read somewhere about someone installin the harddrive direct but i can't find where i read it

ok here's a question is their a hd DVR box or even just a reg DVR box..i can purchase and use with cox service that will let me archive the files somehow to my pc????

No, there are no DVR boxes you can get from Cox that will let you archive to a PC. However, many of us have had success with recording digital channels over firewire using the 3250HD box, but you're still out of luck on the analog channels or the encrypted digital ones.

i was talkin about buyin a box like from pioneer or something like that..i don't mind spendin some money..cox won't even sell you an 8300hd only rent them...if i bought a dvr box would it work with cox do they allow that and if so do the DVR boxes that you can buy can you archive from them or do you run into the same problems with data access

it's sux to believe that no one could bypass the encyprtion on the hard drive it would be great to get ur saved movies onto the pc for backup i have a lan at my place with over 800gigs avalible...so much wasted space...cant someone make something so i can just plug that 8300hd HD into my pc so i can download direct...i guess that would be toooooo hard

lucidvtec,

You could try a Tivo box, from Tivo.com. It works from D*, and suppose to work for cable. I have recorded movies, and then uploaded them to my PC, and burnt it to a DVD. I don't have Cox cable, so I don't know if it works for sure, or not. They have a 30-day money back guarantee, if it doesn't work.

Good luck,

Rich

Only problem with that is that Cox won't authorize a box that isn't theirs, so the only digital channels you would get are the unencryped ones, which consist of the local HD channels, the 2 PPV preview channels, and some weird educational one that shows a bunch of German stuff.


Making something that moves the files over to a PC, besides just being technically difficult, would likely be illegal due to the DMCA (bypassing a copy-protection scheme) so you can forget anyone doing it or even discussing how to do it.

I believe the copy protection flag was declared illegal anyway so I'm not sure transferring a television broadcast for personal use is illegal anymore.

It's not the transferring that would be illegal. It is and always has been perfectly legal today to make a backup for personal use from any channel, as long as there's nothing in place to prevent you from doing so. It's the circumvention of access control (such as the 5c encryption on HBO, or the encryption on almost all the digital channels) that's illegal. Let's review: recording Showtime HD using a 3250HD box hooked up to a PC using firewire...legal. Hacking up a box to go between your 3250 and PC to bypass the 5c on HBO...not legal. Yay America!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and new laws are subject to be bought daily, so what's legal today may not be come 7/1.

Is this still the Phoenix HD reception thread?

Back OT, what's up with channel 61 and the open captioning? Now they're doing it in the middle of program segments.

This is the PHX cable/sat/OTA/8300/HD-Tivo/942 thread...