# How Can we Lobby Tivo to support information for QAM Tuners?



## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

So I know we all want Tivo to generate info for the QAM tuner's so we can record season passes on HD channels. But what can we do to Lobby them to hurry this process up?


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## TiVoMonkey (Jan 12, 2002)

The info for what channel is on what QAM is not given to Tribune, where TiVo gets its guide info from.

QAM layouts are controlled by the individual cable headends.

It would be hard for TiVo to keep any kind of accurate data for this, much less how difficult it would be for them to gather this info from the cable headends.


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## alaan (Nov 2, 2003)

so let me get this straight...as of now, Series 3 Tivo's cannot have season passes on HD channels provided via cable?


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

alaan said:


> so let me get this straight


That would be a really good idea.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

TiVoMonkey said:


> The info for what channel is on what QAM is not given to Tribune, where TiVo gets its guide info from.
> 
> QAM layouts are controlled by the individual cable headends.
> 
> It would be hard for TiVo to keep any kind of accurate data for this, much less how difficult it would be for them to gather this info from the cable headends.


Not really. All they would need is a feature that would duplicate the regular station. For example, if channel 4 comes in 82.001 on the QAM Tuner, you could tell your Tivo that channel 82.001 is the same as channel 4.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

Redux said:


> That would be a really good idea.


  
LOL!


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

alaan said:


> so let me get this straight...as of now, Series 3 Tivo's cannot have season passes on HD channels provided via cable?


No, Tivo will work fine with Season Passes on HD. I am specifically referencing the QAM tuner, (which let's you get HD channels, without paying for HD service.) Hope this makes sense!


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

QAM mapping should not be hard to do - Tivo already has the basic info (mapping station number to frequency).

The Sony DHG boxes have a very easy to use QAM mapping feature - Tivo needs to implement the same type of function, even if doesn't update the mappings automatically.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

jfh3 said:


> QAM mapping should not be hard to do - Tivo already has the basic info (mapping station number to frequency).
> 
> The Sony DHG boxes have a very easy to use QAM mapping feature - Tivo needs to implement the same type of function, even if doesn't update the mappings automatically.


Maybe if Tivo knew that I could buy a Sony DHG because of this feature, it would change their minds, and they would enable this easy feature!


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

Rocko62580 said:


> Maybe if Tivo knew that I could buy a Sony DHG because of this feature, it would change their minds, and they would enable this easy feature!


Except that Sony discontinued the line about a year ago.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

alaan said:


> so let me get this straight...as of now, Series 3 Tivo's cannot have season passes on HD channels provided via cable?


HD Channels on cable work fine, cable cards enable it.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

This missing feature can best be described as the ability to manually map unencrypted QAM channels into the program guide (if not using CableCards).

The best way to lobby TiVo for this missing feature might be to go here and put in a feature request: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm

Please, everybody do this! Even if this doesn't directly affect you (if you use CableCards), it could still be useful to you in the future, plus there are many people waiting on this feature to buy an S3, and more buyers = more subs for TiVo = better prospects that TiVo will survive...


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

Saxion said:


> This missing feature can best be described as the ability to manually map unencrypted QAM channels into the program guide (if not using CableCards).
> 
> The best way to lobby TiVo for this missing feature might be to go here and put in a feature request: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm
> 
> Please, everybody do this! Even if this doesn't directly affect you (if you use CableCards), it could still be useful to you in the future, plus there are many people waiting on this feature to buy an S3, and more buyers = more subs for TiVo = better prospects that TiVo will survive...


Perfect! I just filled mine out!


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## Maeglin (Sep 27, 2006)

Saxion said:


> The best way to lobby TiVo for this missing feature might be to go here and put in a feature request...


Another thanks for that link... I was wondering how to get feature requests to them as well, considering they're not doing email support anymore and the CSRs would probably only pass on half of what they heard if it were explained to them.


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## pjschaffer (Dec 18, 2002)

Rocko62580 said:


> Not really. All they would need is a feature that would duplicate the regular station. For example, if channel 4 comes in 82.001 on the QAM Tuner, you could tell your Tivo that channel 82.001 is the same as channel 4.


Except that cable companies can and often do change the mapping. Thus, if your cable company decided to move Channel 6 to QAM 82.001, how would the S3 know?


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## Leo_N (Nov 13, 2003)

pjschaffer said:


> Except that cables can and often do change the mapping. Thus, if your cable company decided to move Channel 6 to QAM 82.001, how would the S3 know?


I'd say that if Tivo ever does QAM mapping they will end up doing some sort of backdoor enable along with a disclaimer of non-support for the feature. It really is fairly advanced for the normal person. And trying to explain any feature like this would cost TiVo way too much in support costs compared to the number of new buyers it will generate.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

It would be cheaper just to rent the two Cablecards for a few bucks each. If you can afford a $800 DVR, you can afford to rent the cablecards.

An unsupported backdoor for advanced users would be nice, though.

Ther is an open question about QAM channel mapping. Our vacation house TV maps some, but not all, clear qam channels to proper channel numbers (ie, 805) and doesn't see some at all. Some STB's with clear QAM tuners map some channels, and others map all, when tested on the same cable feed. There may be a question of chip set and/or firmware. At least one clear QAM STB only covers up to channel 125. Some cable company headends may not be programmed properly and good luck in trying to speak to somewhat intelligent enough to help figure that out. I talked with a cable system head end tech (not an install tech), who really didn;t understand clear QAM tuners.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

pjschaffer said:


> Except that cable companies can and often do change the mapping. Thus, if your cable company decided to move Channel 6 to QAM 82.001, how would the S3 know?


They don't change the mapping of the OTA rebroadcasts very frequently. The last time they did anything with them in my area was over 2 years ago.



pjschaffer said:


> Thus, if your cable company decided to move Channel 6 to QAM 82.001, how would the S3 know?


The S3 would "know" because the owner would tell it. Manually. The same way it's done on all other HD DVRs. The same way it's been done for years to support the VCRPlus code system. The same way it's been done for years with manually-entered channel labels on TVs and VCRs.

Look, dealing with cable channel lineup changes is nothing new. There is vast and consistent precedent for how to handle these sorts of things...let users manually tweak the channel map. It's not hard, it's not unusual, it doesn't have to be confusing or difficult. It can even be a back-door feature. But it should be an option.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

vstone said:


> It would be cheaper just to rent the two Cablecards for a few bucks each. If you can afford a $800 DVR, you can afford to rent the cablecards.


Not really for you to decide. For those of us who don't already have digital cable, it can be costly...the required upgrades in my area are $6/mo for Digital Gateway Service, $9/mo for HD Service, and $4/mo for a pair of CableCards. That's $228/year just to get what I already get today for free (I'm perfectly content with only the HD offerings on the network feeds).

I really don't understand why anybody would argue against adding this feature. How does this personally affect you negatively? Is there any downside, at all, to anyone? On the plus side, it adds more subs, which is good for TiVo, who desperately needs them.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Saxion said:


> I really don't understand why anybody would argue against adding this feature. How does this personally affect you negatively? Is there any downside, at all, to anyone? On the plus side, it adds more subs, which is good for TiVo, who desperately needs them.


It does, it distracts TiVo from doing things which could otherwise benefit me. If they provide this feature, TiVo are just going to lose, it'll cause support calls and hate when the cable companies change the mappings. There's already a perfectly good solution to this "problem", its the cable card.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

vstone said:


> Ther is an open question about QAM channel mapping. Our vacation house TV maps some, but not all, clear qam channels to proper channel numbers (ie, 805) and doesn't see some at all. Some STB's with clear QAM tuners map some channels, and others map all, when tested on the same cable feed. There may be a question of chip set and/or firmware. At least one clear QAM STB only covers up to channel 125.


QAM is QAM. The "clear" part simply means it's unencrypted. If a TiVo can receive a given digital channel using a CableCard, and that channel is sent unencrypted, then by definition it can also receive the same channel without a CableCard.

The issues you are describing seem related to how some tuners handle the automatic mapping of physical channel numbers (like 79.3) to virtual channel numbers (like 803). Some tuners do a better job than others at handling the optional "PSIP" data that can be included in the channel data stream to describe this mapping, but oftentimes the PSIP data is missing entirely. But that just proves our point...a manual method of mapping clear QAM physical channels into virtual channels would fix all of this.


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

pjschaffer said:


> Except that cable companies can and often do change the mapping. Thus, if your cable company decided to move Channel 6 to QAM 82.001, how would the S3 know?


I would think that the S3 would attempt to revert back to the analog equivalent if there was no signal on the QAM channel.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

btwyx said:


> It does, it distracts TiVo from doing things which could otherwise benefit me.


But I don't lobby against the features _you_ want. I see the value in adding features that benefit different segments of the TiVo user base, even ones that don't concern me. It grows the subscriber base, and keeps TiVo afloat. Can you be big enough to do the same?


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Saxion said:


> Can you be big enough to do the same?


The problem's already been solved. The solution you want is not a good one. Also I'm not lobbying against it, I'm just pointing out its not a good solution, and there's a good one out there already.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Stormspace said:


> I would think that the S3 would attempt to revert back to the analog equivalent if there was no signal on the QAM channel.


There would probably be a signal on the QAM channel. It'd be something else, which would annoy the user no end when it starts recording the wrong programs.


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

btwyx said:


> There would probably be a signal on the QAM channel. It'd be something else, which would annoy the user no end when it starts recording the wrong programs.


That happens now in the S2 units. Many times guide data has been wrong and I've had to search for an alternate showing to get a show. It's no different. Also I would think that QAM channels would be limited in number and not likely to assigned to another network at a whim. It's more likely the QAM channel would just be static or whatever the digital equivalent is if it was no longer valid.


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## pjschaffer (Dec 18, 2002)

Saxion said:


> They don't change the mapping of the OTA rebroadcasts very frequently. The last time they did anything with them in my area was over 2 years ago.


That's really dependant upon your cable system. Cox in Orange County, CA was moving stuff all over the map for a year as they implemented digital simulacasting of all the analog channels. This has slowed down now that the conversion is complete but it still happens occasionally.

I do understand how what you're asking could be useful to some, it just doesn't likely that TiVo would implement it as a feature if they can't be reasonably confident of up to date QAM mappings. The downside to TiVo of recording the wrong show because the QAM mappings changed is much greater than the upside to the limited number of advanced users this would benifit.


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

jfh3 said:


> QAM mapping should not be hard to do - Tivo already has the basic info (mapping station number to frequency).


Not for QAM. 
All Tivo has for cable channels is a channel number.
The relation from that to frequency and subchannel are a function of the cablecard, although it could manually be mapped, and depencing, maybe even mapped without CC, if the data is there in the clear, and Cablelabs will allow access to it.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Stormspace said:


> That happens now in the S2 units. Many times guide data has been wrong and I've had to search for an alternate showing to get a show. It's no different.


Its very different. The guide data is right, you tell it to find the channel in the wrong place, you get annoyed at TiVo.


> Also I would think that QAM channels would be limited in number


Why would you think that? There are 120 or so channels you can have, each one of those can have an unlimited number of subchannels. Its not actually the QAM channel you're concerned about, its the QAM sub channel. I've seen at least 78 sub channels on one channel, it may be over 100 in some cases. There are at least 500 channels on my system, if you want to find a particular channel, you have to look through all of them.


> and not likely to assigned to another network at a whim.


It depends entirely on the operator. I hear my cable system is quite fond of changing them around. There's no reason why they shouldn't. This is not published information, its just a configuration for the cable company to use as it sees fit, and the cable card is the way they smooth this over for the user. If you want to do agressive bandwidth management swapping the subchannels around could make a lot of sense.


> It's more likely the QAM channel would just be static or whatever the digital equivalent is if it was no longer valid.


The channel will still be there, they just put something else on it. If it s clear, it can be recorded. If its not clear, it'll record blank.


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

btwyx said:


> Its very different. The guide data is right, you tell it to find the channel in the wrong place, you get annoyed at TiVo.Why would you think that? There are 120 or so channels you can have, each one of those can have an unlimited number of subchannels. Its not actually the QAM channel you're concerned about, its the QAM sub channel. I've seen at least 78 sub channels on one channel, it may be over 100 in some cases. There are at least 500 channels on my system, if you want to find a particular channel, you have to look through all of them.It depends entirely on the operator. I hear my cable system is quite fond of changing them around. There's no reason why they shouldn't. This is not published information, its just a configuration for the cable company to use as it sees fit, and the cable card is the way they smooth this over for the user. If you want to do agressive bandwidth management swapping the subchannels around could make a lot of sense.The channel will still be there, they just put something else on it. If it s clear, it can be recorded. If its not clear, it'll record blank.


I was under the impression that QAM would be limited to broadcast stations only. Everything else would be encrypted. Is that wrong?


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Stormspace said:


> I was under the impression that QAM would be limited to broadcast stations only. Everything else would be encrypted. Is that wrong?


Every thing on cable is QAM. Some is broadcast in the clear, some is encrypted. When I scanned the QAM channels with my S3 it found all 500 channels, I had to go find the ones which were in the clear.

QAM doesn't mean unencrypted.


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## Scopeman (Oct 22, 2002)

vstone said:


> It would be cheaper just to rent the two Cablecards for a few bucks each. If you can afford a $800 DVR, you can afford to rent the cablecards.
> 
> An unsupported backdoor for advanced users would be nice, though.
> 
> Ther is an open question about QAM channel mapping. Our vacation house TV maps some, but not all, clear qam channels to proper channel numbers (ie, 805) and doesn't see some at all. Some STB's with clear QAM tuners map some channels, and others map all, when tested on the same cable feed. There may be a question of chip set and/or firmware. At least one clear QAM STB only covers up to channel 125. Some cable company headends may not be programmed properly and good luck in trying to speak to somewhat intelligent enough to help figure that out. I talked with a cable system head end tech (not an install tech), who really didn;t understand clear QAM tuners.


I am very surprised to find a thread on this topic.

I live in Austin, TX where we get about locals in the clear via QAM as part of "life-line" cable ($13/month).

I sent Tivo a "Lineup Error" report listing the QAM channels and the correct mapping, using this URL:
http://tivo.instancy.com/external/LineUpForm.aspx

Tivo called our local TW office and got the mapping confirmed, and then updated the channels in the guide to show the same schedule as the comparable OTA channels. Took about 2 to 3 weeks total.

Why would this option not work for all other markets with clear QAM?


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Stormspace said:


> I was under the impression that QAM would be limited to broadcast stations only. Everything else would be encrypted. Is that wrong?


 QAM is a modulation scheme and is short for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. There are many different types of QAM modulation schemes but most cable companies these days use QAM 256 for digital cable transmission. For analog channels it's an entirely different modulation scheme following NTSC standards.

In any case, QAM has nothing to do with encryption. As stated you can have some digital channels that are encrypted and some that are not. "Clear QAM" is a shorthand to describe digital cable channels that are unencrypted, and typically at least the HD local transmissions are usually re-transmitted by the cable company unencrypted.

The crux of this thread is that if Tivo provided a way of us telling it which channels in the guide lineup map to the specific QAM channel-subchannels then one would not have to subscribe to digital cable or need to rent cablecards to tune these channels which could result in significant savings/month on your cable bill. As it is right now without cablecards you can setup manual recordings for these channels but cannot associate them to guide channels and hence no season passes etc. are possible.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

There are several known bugs in the Series 3 software, such as audio dropouts, toxic broadcasts and partial recordings. Plus, there's the known bugs in the latest 8.1 release that hit S2 units and will be hitting S3 before long.

Personally I'd rather Tivo fix these bugs in their software before implementing features such as QAM channel remapping. QAM remapping is:

1) unnecessary (get CableCARD),
2) useful to a very few technically savvy users,
3) is confusing and contrary to the simple Tivo end-user experience, and
4) is likely to result in lots of complaints and customer service issues for Tivo.

And that's not even including missing features like MRV and eSATA, which most S3 owners (including myself) would much rather see.


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## hiker (Nov 29, 2001)

Well stated, mportuesi, I agree. Two cablecards are only $1.50/mo. here with Comcast and when multistream cards are available it should be no cost.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

hiker said:


> Well stated, mportuesi, I agree. Two cablecards are only $1.50/mo. here with Comcast and when multistream cards are available it should be no cost.


 Once again I must re-iterate: *Cablecards are not the only extra cost involved*. In order to get cablecards you must also subscribe to *digital cable* which is pretty significant cost on your monthly bill. If all you care about in digital lineup are the unencrypted digital channels then you could save a bundle per month by not getting digital cable service and not renting cablecards. For me that would mean about $17/month in savings on cable bill.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

moyekj said:


> In order to get cablecards you must also subscribe to *digital cable* which is pretty significant cost on your monthly bill.


My channels are all digital. If I dropped down to $14 basic cable, I think (but haven't tested this), I'd be able to keep the cards to access them.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

btwyx said:


> There's already a perfectly good solution to this "problem", its the cable card.


Sorry, but that's not a good solution - most cable companies will not even rent the CableCARDs to you in the first place if you don't already have a digital package.

The people that want this feature don't want to have to add $40-$70/month to their cable bill to record unencrypted stations using their Tivo.

This is an advanced feature - those that understand it will understand that they will have to check the mappings from time to time, unless/until Tribune starts tracking/providing this data.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

btwyx said:


> My channels are all digital. If I dropped down to $14 basic cable, I think (but haven't tested this), I'd be able to keep the cards to access them.


In theory, yes.

But I doubt many cable companies have their back-end systems set up to allow this (e.g. set your cards to authorize only the unencrypted, in the clear, broadcasts).


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

moyekj said:


> In order to get cablecards you must also subscribe to *digital cable* which is pretty significant cost on your monthly bill.


I don't think that's true in my area.

At any rate I know for sure that you can get $10 basic cable then add a premium like HBO (supported thru cablecard) without getting digital cable. I think it's an FCC rule that MSOs must offer premiums without requiring digital cable.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

moyekj said:


> Once again I must re-iterate: *Cablecards are not the only extra cost involved*. In order to get cablecards you must also subscribe to *digital cable* which is pretty significant cost on your monthly bill.


I don't subscribe to digital cable, but I do have CableCARD. I get HD channels, and digital simulcast for the analog ones.

In my neck of the woods (Comcast San Francisco), you can get CableCARD without subscribing to digital cable, which will get you the locals in HD:

HDTV - Limited Basic

702 KTVU-2 (FOX) HD
703 KNTV-HDTV
704 KRON-HD
705 KPIX-(CBS)
707 KGO-HDTV
709 KQED-HDTV

HDTV - Digital Classic

719 InDemand - HD
720 FSNBA (Check Listings For Times)
722 Discovery - HD
723 ESPN - HD
724 ESPN 2 HD
725 HD Special Events
726 TNT HD

Note that the local stations do *NOT* require Digital Cable service. All they require is CableCARD for $1.50 a month. This is the exact same lineup you would get if Tivo gave you QAM mapping.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

classicsat said:


> Not for QAM.
> All Tivo has for cable channels is a channel number.
> The relation from that to frequency and subchannel are a function of the cablecard, although it could manually be mapped, and depencing, maybe even mapped without CC, if the data is there in the clear, and Cablelabs will allow access to it.


Sorry, I was being overly simplistic. The mapping would still be simple, just a table created from the existing channel list.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

mportuesi said:


> I don't subscribe to digital cable, but I do have CableCARD. I get HD channels, and digital simulcast for the analog ones.
> 
> In my neck of the woods (Comcast San Francisco), you can get CableCARD without subscribing to digital cable, which will get you the locals in HD:
> 
> ...


You are pretty lucky if you can get HD versions of ESPN, ESPN2 and TNT without an underlying package. That's not supposed to happen - which is probably why most cable companies require you to get a digital package.


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

jfh3 said:


> You are pretty lucky if you can get HD versions of ESPN, ESPN2 and TNT without an underlying package. That's not supposed to happen - which is probably why most cable companies require you to get a digital package.


Precisely. You only still have them because your market's cable head-end folks don't know better. Goa dvertising it on *some* forums, and it will be noticed and disabled. Happened in the DC area in some Comcast neighborhoods.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

mportuesi said:


> There are several known bugs in the Series 3 software, such as audio dropouts, toxic broadcasts and partial recordings. Plus, there's the known bugs in the latest 8.1 release that hit S2 units and will be hitting S3 before long.
> 
> Personally I'd rather Tivo fix these bugs in their software before implementing features such as QAM channel remapping. QAM remapping is:
> 
> ...


For anyone that understands what QAM mapping is, it's not confusing at all. The Sony DHG box does it and it is trivial - no reason the S3 can't do the same. Would I like to see other features have a higher priority over this? Sure.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> I don't subscribe to digital cable, but I do have CableCARD. I get HD channels, and digital simulcast for the analog ones.


 I would venture to say this is an exception, not the rule. I asked my cable company about dropping digital cable and keeping the cablecards and they said that's not possible. Some in this forum have stated in the past you can just cancel digital service and hope they don't ask for the cablecards back and don't notice the "strange" configuration of the account with cablecard charges and no digital cable service. In any event that seems like a questionable way to keep things setup at best and I wouldn't want to count on that to continue working unchallenged.

I agree this should not have priority over bug fixes, MRV, TTG, etc. but to totally discount it as a worthless request when there are clearly many who want and understand the implications of it is going too far.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

jfh3 said:


> You are pretty lucky if you can get HD versions of ESPN, ESPN2 and TNT without an underlying package. That's not supposed to happen - which is probably why most cable companies require you to get a digital package.


Please go back and read what I wrote. The "Limited Basic" channels do not require digital cable. The "Digital Classic" channels do. The "Limited Basic" channels are exactly the same ones you would get through clear QAM channel remapping.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> Please go back and read what I wrote. The "Limited Basic" channels do not require digital cable. The "Digital Classic" channels do. The "Limited Basic" channels are exactly the same ones you would get through clear QAM channel remapping.


If you are able to get CableCards on "Limited Basic" service, then you are very lucky. I guarantee this is not how things work in my neck of the woods, because I asked. I have to subscribe to some sort of digital programming (HBO, HDTV, etc) to get a CableCard.

THANKS to all of you who put in this feature request!


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## MScottC (Sep 11, 2004)

I too am for a "backdoor" or "advanced user" option, where one is warned of all the pitfalls of Manual QAM Mapping. Given all the potential pitfalls involved in mapping, especially the work involved in setting up the mapping, and the potential of headend changes screwing up that most important recording, this is a function that could ruin the "user experience" for all but the more tech savvy users. 

I really do wonder, if one of the cablelab requirements imposed on TiVo is the use of CCs in order to find/tune and use the channels. I too, am in a market where they mandate buying the digital tier and an additional outlet fee in order to rent 2 cable cards at $1.50/month. I won't know what my total bill will be for another 10 or so months, as the good folks at Comcast put me (unbeknownst to me till I got my first bill since the CC install) a promotion for Digital Silver for a year. If my bill goes up horrendously at the end of this promotion, I too may be wishing for QAM mapping in order to record the three major networks, which quite frankly make up the vast majority of what my wife and I watch.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

Saxion said:


> ...
> I really don't understand why anybody would argue against adding this feature. How does this personally affect you negatively? Is there any downside, at all, to anyone? On the plus side, it adds more subs, which is good for TiVo, who desperately needs them.


I'm not really against it. In fact I hope it becomes supported if the S3 supports MRV soon. I'd love to have a second S3 in the bedroom wher I can go when my wife is using the main TV for shows that don't appeal top me. This second TV would not need the cablecards.

My real point is that there are unresolved issues with QAM tuners. These issues may be chip, firmware, etc related. At this point we can't really say that cable companies are not a partial cause. These may be some techical reason why the S3 chipset cannot even detect all clear QAM channels.

It would be nice if Tivo would say whether or not there is an issue with the S3, with the cable companies, etc and say whether thsi feature can be added without rewtiting significant pieces of code. Remember analog channels are self defined by their frequency. The Tivo was designed to get digital cable channel numbers from the cablecard. Maybe they didn't foresee or dismissed the desire for manual mapping of QAM channels. Maybe there is a technical reason why the S3 can't detect and/or can't manually assign clear QAM channels.

It would be nice for them to say something on the matter.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

jfh3 said:


> In theory, yes.
> 
> But I doubt many cable companies have their back-end systems set up to allow this (e.g. set your cards to authorize only the unencrypted, in the clear, broadcasts).


Hear, Hear!

How many hear think that cable operations are properly set up everywhere? Anywhere? We just recently got TCM in stereo here. The instalations techs are system techs are given only enough info to make the system work and rarely have time to do anything beyond that!


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

vstone said:


> Maybe there is a technical reason why the S3 can't detect and/or can't manually assign clear QAM channels.


 Before I got cablecards my S3 was able to tune to all unencrypted QAM channels. A scan did not find them all but since I keep track of the unencrypted channels with a QAM capable PC tuner card I know exactly where they are and could directly tune them and then add them to the channel lineup. The only thing missing is a means of manually associating them with guide channels.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

moyekj said:


> Before I got cablecards my S3 was able to tune to all unencrypted QAM channels. A scan did not find them all but since I keep track of the unencrypted channels with a QAM capable PC tuner card I know exactly where they are and could directly tune them and then add them to the channel lineup. The only thing missing is a means of manually associating them with guide channels.


Sounds to me like your S3 could not find all of the clear QAM channels by itself. All mine found was about 16 versions of channel "0."


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

(moyekj & vstone) That is VERY odd. Mine found all (100+) QAM-in-the-clear channels, including the 4 local HD OTAs, PBS, a few inDemand/PPV 'channels' currently active and a plethora of MusicChoice channels (with a background album art/poop-up video thing) and another plethora of sound-only music channels.

Every single one that my HDTV's QAM tuner also found.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

ashu said:


> (moyekj & vstone) That is VERY odd. Mine found all (100+) QAM-in-the-clear channels, including the 4 local HD OTAs, PBS, a few inDemand/PPV 'channels' currently active and a plethora of MusicChoice channels (with a background album art/poop-up video thing) and another plethora of sound-only music channels.
> 
> Every single one that my HDTV's QAM tuner also found.


That's why I think that cable head-end setups are part of the problem.

Some S3's have no problems, some have some problems, some have lots of problems. It would be interesting to see if we could correlate problems to one or more specific cable companies (although it's more likely to be specific to a cable system than a cable company) and/or one of more pieces of head-end equipment make/model. It might be that the only way to address this area is for the FCC to pressure the cable companies and opencable labs to look into this and fix what needs to be fixed.

Sounds like the S3 doesn't have a problem with properly setup cable systems, but it could just be that the S3 was not tested against a wide variety of cable systems and/or head-end equipment.

I don't expect a quick resolution, but it would be nice for Tivo to acknowledge the issue and suspected causes.


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

moyekj said:


> QAM is a modulation scheme and is short for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. There are many different types of QAM modulation schemes but most cable companies these days use QAM 256 for digital cable transmission. For analog channels it's an entirely different modulation scheme following NTSC standards.
> 
> In any case, QAM has nothing to do with encryption. As stated you can have some digital channels that are encrypted and some that are not. "Clear QAM" is a shorthand to describe digital cable channels that are unencrypted, and typically at least the HD local transmissions are usually re-transmitted by the cable company unencrypted.
> 
> The crux of this thread is that if Tivo provided a way of us telling it which channels in the guide lineup map to the specific QAM channel-subchannels then one would not have to subscribe to digital cable or need to rent cablecards to tune these channels which could result in significant savings/month on your cable bill. As it is right now without cablecards you can setup manual recordings for these channels but cannot associate them to guide channels and hence no season passes etc. are possible.


I got that, but what *btwyx* was saying suggested that an unlimited set of Clear QAM channels would be available. My contention was that it would likely be a limited set based on local broadcast HD stations only. Currently there are what, four major networks and two minor plus independents? Granted in a densely populated area like DC this might add up to a lot, but for most of the country we are talking at most maybe 10 stations. Currently in my area with a good roof mounted antennae I can get ABC, CBS, Fox, CW, PBS, and NBC (Maybe). Unfortunately I don't have a good roof mounted aerial, so I only get CBS and ABC without cable. Still I don't think TW is going to give me anything other than locals without making me pay more.


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## woodie (Feb 7, 2005)

Until recently, I had a cable trap that filtered out out 35-66. My Series 2 was able to record 68 SciFi, but my Series3 (with cablecards) was not.. channel 68 was blocked. I also noticed that the series 3 was able to tune some of the analog channels that were filtered out, like 48 Bravo, 56 CNN, 65 Court TV, because the cablecards were remapping a digital to the lower channel number.

Now that I have extended basic, I can tell that most of the lower channels are now digital (remapped QAM channel, replacing the same analog channel). My recordings from 15 Discovery, 68 SciFi, 63 Comedy Central and 37 TNT are of a superior quality to what I would see from my Pioneer 810H, with component video out.

Cablecards make most of your channels look really good, they are simple to install (in my experience), and they are extremely inexpensive (for me: first one free, second one $1.50/mo), so if you have cable and a Series 3, get the cablecards.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

You are assuming that you have digital versions of the analog channels. I do not. However, the S3's MPEG processing on the analog channels also works very well.


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## gbrown (Oct 31, 2006)

Another way to do this is to split the cable. I run one side into my Bravia and the other into my S3. That allows me to watch a QAM encoded HiDef channel on the TV while I record 2 other channels on my TiVo. 

The Bravia does a fine job of tuning any and all digital channels. Albeit it takes 30 to 50 minutes to tune and then anothe 30 to 60 minutes deleating the digital audio and unwanted (shopping for me) channels.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Stormspace said:


> I got that, but what *btwyx* was saying suggested that an unlimited set of Clear QAM channels would be available. My contention was that it would likely be a limited set based on local broadcast HD stations only.


I only said there's potentially unlimited number of QAM channels, up till them you never mentioned "clear", that's one difference in what you're saying.

Also its not just HD stations which are in clear QAM, its all the basic cable stations for me. That's all the broadcast stations, all the crap stations (home shopping, local access etc) and the lowest tier of the good channels (CNN, Discovery, Travel, etc).

There were about 60 clear QAM (sub) channels on my system when I looked.

I can't remember if the music channels were clear, if they were, there were another 100-200 clear QAM channels to look through.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> I don't subscribe to digital cable, but I do have CableCARD. I get HD channels, and digital simulcast for the analog ones.
> 
> In my neck of the woods (Comcast San Francisco), you can get CableCARD without subscribing to digital cable, which will get you the locals in HD:
> 
> ...


\

Called my cable company today and asked for the cable cards. You need to subscribe to full cable (I only get basic) plus digital plus HD service. That would be an extra 65.99 a month. You do the math! We need QAM technology on the S3 NOW!!!!!! Your idea doesn't work!


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## woodie (Feb 7, 2005)

Comcast issued me cablecards with only limited-basic + HD ($13 + $5).


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

Rocko62580 said:


> Called my cable company today and asked for the cable cards. You need to subscribe to full cable (I only get basic) plus digital plus HD service. That would be an extra 65.99 a month. You do the math! We need QAM technology on the S3 NOW!!!!!! Your idea doesn't work!


Try calling the cable company again and get a different customer service rep. CSRs these days can be totally clueless, no matter what company you deal with (cell phone, satellite, cable, Tivo). You might get a different one who actually knows what's going on.

As for the extra cost in general..... I'd love to get HBO, Showtime and Cinemax service in HD too, but the cable company wants $$$$$ for that, so I don't pay. It's reasonable for the cable company to charge extra for premium programming, but it's not Tivo's fault if you have to pay extra to get HD. The cable company's rates are public information, and you can easily determine if you're willing to pay for the extra service _before_ purchasing the S3 unit.

Finally, if you really can't get CableCARD service so you can get the clear QAM channels, look into attaching an antenna to your Tivo to get over-the-air broadcasts. In general, the clear QAM channels are the same ones broadcast OTA, and OTA is free. The Series 3 happily accepts both antenna and cable at the same time.


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

woodie said:


> Comcast issued me cablecards with only limited-basic + HD ($13 + $5).


$5 is for HD set top box rental, which you shouldn't have to pay unless you have that box from Comcast.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> Finally, if you really can't get CableCARD service so you can get the clear QAM channels, look into attaching an antenna to your Tivo to get over-the-air broadcasts.


Impossible for many people, including myself. I live in a valley on the bottom floor of a 5-story condo.

We've also clearly debunked the theory that CableCards are always a negligible cost. Did you see the news that Comcast are raising rates again by 6.5%?

There is no reason TiVo cannot do what other HD-DVRs have been able to do: manual tweaking of the channel map. Overblown fears of massive customer confusion obviously did not stop Sony and others from including this useful feature. The bottom line is, excluding it will keep some consumers from ever buying an S3. This is bad. TiVo needs every sub it can get.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

Saxion said:


> Impossible for many people, including myself. I live in a valley on the bottom floor of a 5-story condo.


I was only trying to be helpful.



Saxion said:


> We've also clearly debunked the theory that CableCards are always a negligible cost. Did you see the news that Comcast are raising rates again by 6.5%?


Comcast is raising their rates for _all_ customers, _including_ the 99.9% who do not own Tivo Series 3 units. That has nothing to do with CableCARD.

As I understand it, the FCC requires cable system operators to make the CableCARDs available at nominal cost. The real issue is that some cable system operators are requiring customers to subscribe to programming packages they don't want in order to get CableCARD. I don't know if that's legal or not, but that's the cable company's fault, not Tivo's.

Tivo doesn't have an obligation to offer users access to every bit of functionality that is ultimately possible with their hardware, especially when doing so is likely to cost them money by support issues in the long run.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> Comcast is raising their rates for _all_ customers, _including_ the 99.9% who do not own Tivo Series 3 units. That has nothing to do with CableCARD.


You are telling people to go out and upgrade their cable service to solve this problem, exposing them to higher costs and higher rate increases in the future (rate increases to a "Basic Cable" package will always be less than increases to a "Basic Cable+Digital Gateway+HD+CableCard" package). All to free up TiVo resources to fix the issues _you_ want fixed. Are you asking me to subsidize your pet features?


mportuesi said:


> Tivo doesn't have an obligation to offer users access to every bit of functionality that is ultimately possible


They have an obligation to sell to as large a market as they can. You are totally blowing the implications of this feature way out of proportion.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

Saxion said:


> You are telling people to go out and upgrade their cable service to solve this problem


I'm saying that Tivo doesn't deserve the blame for cable company pricing policies.


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## mportuesi (Nov 11, 2002)

Saxion said:


> All to free up TiVo resources to fix the issues _you_ want fixed. Are you asking me to subsidize your pet features?.


As I recall, QAM remapping is _your_ pet feature, not mine.

My "pet features" are either:

- bug fixes for debilitating flaws in the current software (toxic recordings, partial recordings) which have appeal to 100% of the user base
- or Series 2 features that should be part of the product but aren't there (MRV, Tivo-To-Go) that have appeal to the vast majority of users.

Go ahead and put up a poll and find out how many people want QAM channel remapping, if they even know what it is.


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## Runch Machine (Feb 7, 2002)

jfh3 said:


> QAM mapping should not be hard to do - Tivo already has the basic info (mapping station number to frequency).
> 
> The Sony DHG boxes have a very easy to use QAM mapping feature - Tivo needs to implement the same type of function, even if doesn't update the mappings automatically.


This is true. The Sony reads the PSIP data that the local stations send as part of the digital broadcast. For those that done't know, PSIP data is what tells your tuner that when it receives digital channel 32, to map it to 4.1 (or what ever). In my area, local channel 4 has their digital broadcast on channel 32. PSIP data makes it show up as 4.1. Tivo can read PSIP data from the over the air tuner. It should be easy to make it read the same data from the cable input and map channe 112.1 to 4.1.


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## rehr0001 (Sep 17, 2006)

According to what I've read in the forum, cable companies are not required to send the PSIP information along with the cable feed and quite often, they don't.


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## Runch Machine (Feb 7, 2002)

rehr0001 said:


> According to what I've read in the forum, cable companies are not required to send the PSIP information along with the cable feed and quite often, they don't.


I am not sure about the ability to take the PSIP data out. It's part of the digital bit stream. Many cable systems pass the digital OTA received signal unmodified.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

Runch Machine said:


> I am not sure about the ability to take the PSIP data out. It's part of the digital bit stream. Many cable systems pass the digital OTA received signal unmodified.


On a station which is broadcasting one HD channel and one or two SD channels, isn't the PSIP data attached to the full data stream, not the individual channels? If so, the cable company would have to add this info to the indivudual channel. They aren't going to pay to do this.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

vstone said:


> On a station which is broadcasting one HD channel and one or two SD channels, isn't the PSIP data attached to the full data stream, not the individual channels? If so, the cable company would have to add this info to the indivudual channel. They aren't going to pay to do this.


 From what I've seen capturing entire OTA transport streams with a HD PC capture card and examining them with TSReaderLite the PSIP information is stored along with each substream - each substream has a video track, 1 or more audio tracks, 1 or more CC tracks and a PSIP track. For my cable company re-transmissions for whatever reasons most have the PSIP information stripped with the exception of ABC HD and FOX HD.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

moyekj said:


> ...
> For my cable company re-transmissions for whatever reasons most have the PSIP information stripped with the exception of ABC HD and FOX HD.


This inconsistancy supports my contention that most, or at least some, cable systems probably are not set up right.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

vstone said:


> This inconsistancy supports my contention that most, or at least some, cable systems probably are not set up right.


 This really has no bearing on QAM channel mapping. As long as I know the frequencies of the clear QAM channels (which I do) and have a means of tracking any changes (HD local channels have not changed for 2 years in my headend) I don't really care if there is PSIP information in the cable re-transmissions or not.


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## dt_dc (Jul 31, 2003)

rehr0001 said:


> According to what I've read in the forum, cable companies are not required to send the PSIP information along with the cable feed and quite often, they don't.


Cable plants that are 750MHz or greater are required to carry the PSIP data for all unencrypted channels if it is supplied by the broadcaster.

See 47CFR76.640

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/...ccess.gpo.gov/cfr_2005/octqtr/47cfr76.640.htm


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

moyekj said:


> This really has no bearing on QAM channel mapping. As long as I know the frequencies of the clear QAM channels (which I do) and have a means of tracking any changes (HD local channels have not changed for 2 years in my headend) I don't really care if there is PSIP information in the cable re-transmissions or not.


Yes, you have the frequencies, but as you said earlier, you had to use a PC to find all of them. You admitted that the Tivo couldn't find them. At this point we don't know if the failure to find them is hardware or software related on the Tivo end or hardware setup related on the cable plant end. A combination of these may (or may not) be very hard to identify. I don't know whether or not some relatively simple software can fix it. If it's problem with the S3's chip set with some cable plant hardware, then Tivo is not likely to be able to address this without going to S3.1. If it's a problem with improper configuration of the cable plant equipment setup, that's pretty hard for them to identify on a case by case basis and still may be hard for them to fix.

My brother just went down our vacation home Wednesday. 3 weeks ago our clear QAM TV picked up 8 of 11 clear QAM HD channels. The tuner also picked up 3 clear QAM SD channels (that you could find up running channel up through the frequencies) that were not identified with a given cable channel number. Yesterday he could get 1 HD clear QAM channel. That may or may not indicate changing frquency assignments (perhaps affected by the NFL's manipulation of their channel and availability of games, but that's subject for another day) but the disppearance of most, but not all clear QAM channels is certainly troubling. It doesn't prove anything, but it's troubling.

My comment about inconsistent transmission of PSIP info by cable companies infers that other technical issues also probably exist with cable system transmissions and some of these issues may affect identification of channels and/or frequencies by the S3.

I think it's fair to say that we paid big bucks for the S3 and continue to pay for support and Tivo should repay us by at least briefly acknowledging the issue publicly with possible causes and with a disclaimer that they have their programming priorities and this may not be amoing them. I know they have good reasons for not doing it, but I think they should.

My PC clear QAM tuner card once found a hard core video. PPV, I assume. Maybe Tivo is trying to protect us from that. If so, they are taking the wrong approach as someone in another thread saw some of this on his Tivo that he'd bought for his children to be able to watch without monitoring.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

dt_dc said:


> Cable plants that are 750MHz or greater are required to carry the PSIP data for all unencrypted channels if it is supplied by the broadcaster.
> ...


But how do we verify that they do? Perhaps part of the solution lies in having the Tivo tell us when there are unencrypted channels without PSIP data. I wouldn't think that Tivo is looking for PSIP data, but for the virtual cable channel number, so adding a manual unsupported mapping feature now might be superceded by an automatic one later. The second solution may require modifying the Tivo DB layout and may require modifying the programming data that we receive via phone or Internet. I wouldn't expect automatic support soon, if ever.

THis assumes that local HD channels are unencypted, which depending on who you believe, is or is not required by the FCC.


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## cogx (Sep 23, 2006)

Wow, I thought everyone gave up on this two months ago, like I did after
my twelve e-mail replies back and forth with the TiVo "lineup agents"
finally led me to sadly accept the fact they were never going to give in
on this issue (out of stubbornness as far as I can tell, because it is
*NOT* a complex programming issue at all.)

First, my plea to TiVo is limited in scope perhaps from what others are
asking for. I do see that some people appear to be asking for the ability
to map all digital cable stations to their cable company's corresponding
QAM channels. Well, I do concede that is the purpose of and why TiVo
added support for the CableCard.

No, what I'm asking for is trivial, because ALL OF THE DATA IS ALREADY IN
MY TIVO! I am *ONLY* talking about broadcast television stations (ABC,
CBS, CW, FOX, PBS, NBC, etc.) which many/most of our cable providers re-
broadcast unencrypted, specifically the HD channels, which are the ones of
interest specifically those TiVo owners who shelled out top-dollar for the
Series 3 in the first place.

Here's what I'm talking about, as an example, because I find that many
posts in this and other threads on this forum really are arguing against
something they clearly aren't fully understanding.

During setup of a TiVo S3, one enters in a zip code, so that the
channel:station database is populated with the relevant "ANT" (over-the-
air) channel:station entries for one's viewing area.

Let's use an example, suppose one's S3's CHANNEL LIST screen looked
something like this:

2_1 ANT KABCDT [KABC-DT digital frequency 52, ABC affiliate] 
3_1 ANT KFOXDT [KFOX-DT digital frequency 53, FOX affiliate] 
24 CBL USA
25 CBL TNT
... 
101_1 CBL * 
101_2 CBL *

Now, let's assume that channel 101_1 is a clear QAM channel the cable
company is re-broadcasting KABC-DT on and channel 101_2 is KFOX-DT.

In order to use 101_1 and 101_2 properly, that is, to have guide data
associated with it, all we need is either for the TiVo "line agents" to do
it or to add some simple mechanism to let the end-user do it, to set an
association (pointer, link, whatever programming term one might
understand) between QAM channel 101_1 to station KABC-DT and QAM channel
101_2 to KFOX-DT.

That's all I'm talking about. As they say, this ain't rocket science, it's
basic computer programming concepts (data structures). The data structures
that TiVo uses to associate station KABC-DT to ANT channel 2_1, in this
example, can just as easily be used to also associate station KABC-DT to
QAM channel 101_1.

So, frustratingly, the guide data I personally want for my clear QAM HD
broadcast channels is ALREADY ON MY TIVO S3, but alas because TiVo doesn't
want to support it, those clear QAM channels are useless for recording
purposes, which is the entire point of owning a TiVo in the first place.

Now, people with CableCards working in their S3s can roll their eyes all
they want, but digital cable here is an *EXTRA* $25 per month, simply to
allow people in my area the ability to record say CSI and Lost in HD. With only 
trivial changes to my S3's configuration, TiVo could do the right thing and associate, or allow me to associate, *existing* station guide data already on my S3 box to my clear QAM channels.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

cogx said:


> Wow, I thought everyone gave up on this two months ago, like I did after
> my twelve e-mail replies back and forth with the TiVo "lineup agents"
> finally led me to sadly accept the fact they were never going to give in
> on this issue (out of stubbornness as far as I can tell, because it is
> ...


A very good explanation! I wish Tivo would at least reply to this board and tell us what their plans are for this! Can't they see that many people have found this to be of interest? It is the least they can do! I am sure there are people who work for the company that follow this board! Come on Tivo step up to the plate!


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

I can do this with my Aquos; I used my "bookmark" buttons (or whatever they're called) to store the frequencies of my local digital broadcasts

I don't know how complicated this feature would be, but I'd love to see it! I know I can get these channels with a good antenna - which I'll have to experiment with - but why go through the hassle?

I sent in my Feature Request to the TiVo folks; hoping to see it

I really want a Series3, and this is one issue that's got me stuck...


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

cogx said:


> That's all I'm talking about. As they say, this ain't rocket science, it's basic computer programming concepts (data structures).


It's not rocket science, it's simple arrogance on TiVo's part. They think they understand the "TiVo experience" better than you do. So they give you what they think you need, NOT what you want. Just like TiVo refuses to implement a free space indicator despite people asking for one on pretty much a daily basis.

If S3 had this sort of QAM mapping, I'd already own one. Now, without it, I refuse to buy. I can afford it, but it's to f***ing expensive for what it does for me! I'm waiting to see what's in the first software update for S3 before I make my final decision to walk away from TiVo (think Myth TV instead). I'll spend just as much on Myth TV as S3 (because I'll buy a canned solution rather than roll my own) but at least I can theoretically work around any limitations (use the source, Luke).


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

I don't think its arrogance, I wouldn't fancy the support headaches this would involve. As I've said many times, the problem's already been solved. Cable cards are the right solution for this.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> I don't think its arrogance, I wouldn't fancy the support headaches this would involve. As I've said many times, the problem's already been solved. Cable cards are the right solution for this.


Haven't you paid attention. People that get QAM don't have Cable Cards. The cable companies want big bucks for these. Dude, maybe you should not be in this post anymore, because you are upsetting a lot of people. And you seem to be the only one here that is against the Tivo mapping move. There are many people who want this feature, and it does not effect you, so chill!


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

btwyx said:


> I don't think its arrogance, I wouldn't fancy the support headaches this would involve. As I've said many times, the problem's already been solved. Cable cards are the right solution for this.


 When will this point rub into you - people that really want this only desire limited or basic cable + HD locals via cable and don't want to pay the big monthly bill increase _normally_ associated with digital cable & cablecards. Yes there are a few that have already posted they can get cablecards + HD channels on the cheap without having to upgrade to digital cable, but that's a minority. I too fail to see why you would lobby so hard against this...


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

moyekj said:


> I too fail to see why you would lobby so hard against this...


I'm not lobbying for or against anything, but your rose tinted specs aren't allowing you to see what the disadvantages of your scheme are.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

And if cable cards are the right solution, but you think the cable companies want too much for a cable card, maybe you should be lobbying the cable companies, or their regulators to make cable cards affordable. Which they are supposed to be.

You're all het up at at TiVo, why not channel some of that energy where it belongs.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

btwyx said:


> I'm not lobbying for or against anything, but your rose tinted specs aren't allowing you to see what the disadvantages of your scheme are.


 Your constant negative presence in this thread begs to differ... I think we know your position on this matter very clearly by now as you do mine. Thanks for your opinion and we will just respectfully have to agree to disagree.


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

To summarize this argument and hopefully end it....

- When CableCards are inexpensive (less than $5/month?) then they're the solution. Most commonly, but not exclusively, when you already have Digital Cable service
- When CableCards are expensive or otherwise unavailable, and the user has the knowledge and desire, the ability to say "This channel is really that channel" would be an advantage - and a selling point - for many people

Nobody's saying this should be top priority over bugs and "missing features", and its been acknowledged that it could be either a hidden feature or otherwise "unsupported" because its a little too complex for some people

CableCards are one solution, but are not the only possible solution and do not work for everybody. An antenna is a solution for some, but not everyone. The QAM tuner trick would help fill in some of the gaps nicely.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Cable cards are the right technical solution to this problem. User QAM mapping is a bad solution.

As I understand the regulations, and someone should correct me if I'm wrong:

1. Cable cards are mandated access method for accessing digital cable.

2. They are supposed to be available at nominal cost.

3. Access too basic cable is the only regulated part of cable.

4. The HD broadcast channels are part of basic cable (whic is why they're clear).

Therefore: The regulations say you're supposed to be able to get cable cards (the correct technical solution) to access clear QAM channels at nominal cost.

If you are not able to get a cable card to access clear QAM channels at nominal cost, you should be complaining the to relevant regulatory authority. The relevant authority is the franchising authority, contact information for which should be printed on your bill. The franchising authority only has authority over access to basic cable, but that is exactly what this problem is.

So has anyone here who's complaining that cable card access to basic cable is too expensive complained to the relevant authority? If not why are you belly aching about TiVo when you can even used the avenues which are open to you?

When I first got the S3 Comcast were basically charging $6.95 for a cable card as an "extra digtial outlet" fee. I was ready to start complaining to my franchising authority about this excessive fee for the card, I was going to frame it as a complaint about access to basic cable which would put it under the franchising authority's remit.

So have you complained?


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

There's another scenario -- people who don't directly pay for their cable. Various apartment complexes and other housing arrangements provide residents with cable. That's covered through rental expenses, etc. So people have cable provided to them -- they're not stealing it -- but don't directly pay for it.

How are these folks supposed to get CableCards?


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## Adam1115 (Dec 15, 2003)

btwyx said:


> I don't think its arrogance, I wouldn't fancy the support headaches this would involve. As I've said many times, the problem's already been solved. Cable cards are the right solution for this.


Cable cards aren't the right solution if:

1) Cable Company doesn't support cable cards. (There are many that don't, only MAJOR cable companies have to comply. There are also colleges, MDU implementations that don't either. They may use QAM.)

2) Some dink cable companies are making people buy cablecards for $100-$150 EACH. $300 up front hardly seems like the right solution to be able to record your in the clear local channels.., which btw, most QAM tuners and TV's can handle just fine, including guide data.) Even if they don't, why is it reasonable for me to have to pay $10/mo for cablecards, plus a truck roll to get my locals that I already pay for?? (And receive, and watch, just can't record!!)

3) Other cable companies want you to have FULL EXTENDED BASIC, PLUS Digital Cable to even qualify to PAY FOR a cablecard. All to watch your in the clear QAM locals that you can already watch on your QAM capable TV?? That's ridiculous.

And I don't think we're talking about "USER MAPPING" of qam channels, I think we're talking about TiVo allowing a QAM channel as part of it's line up. A $189 TV tuner STB doesn't have this problem, why does the $799 TiVo?


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Adam1115 said:


> Cable cards aren't the right solution if:
> 
> 1) Cable Company doesn't support cable cards.


That sounds like a line up issue. If the compay is publishing the channel information. I thought the problem under discussion was when this information is not published. Is anyone having this problem?


> 2) Some dink cable companies are making people buy cablecards for $100-$150 EACH. $300 up front


That would be bad, is anyone having this problem? I dont know how this lines up with the regulations that cable cards should be available at nominal cost. That's be worth exploring.

It'd help if TiVo could impliment assymetric tuners on the S3, at least then you'd only need one card, which would halve the problem.


> 3) Other cable companies want you to have FULL EXTENDED BASIC, PLUS Digital Cable to even qualify to PAY FOR a cablecard.


See my reply 2 before your question.


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## Adam1115 (Dec 15, 2003)

btwyx said:


> That sounds like a line up issue. If the compay is publishing the channel information. I thought the problem under discussion was when this information is not published. Is anyone having this problem?That would be bad, is anyone having this problem? I dont know how this lines up with the regulations that cable cards should be available at nominal cost. That's be worth exploring.
> 
> It'd help if TiVo could impliment assymetric tuners on the S3, at least then you'd only need one card, which would halve the problem.See my reply 2 before your question.


I agree, we are discussing a line up problem, cable company's offer QAM but to people who don't have cable cards it can't be recorded because there is no guide information.

Is anyone having what problem? Small cable companies aren't required to provide cable cards and the ones that do are charging an arm and a leg. What is a nominal cost? $150 might be to a small cable co that has to buy them, and pull half their crew off for a day to figure out how to make them work..

Anyway, yes people are having this problem, Here's one:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=328433

I wonder if this guys college is going to provide cablecards??

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=328513


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> Cable cards are the right technical solution to this problem. User QAM mapping is a bad solution.
> 
> As I understand the regulations, and someone should correct me if I'm wrong:
> 
> ...


Ok, I will take you up on this. How do I phrase this to the commuity? I am sure they have no idea what QAM signals even are!


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> Ok, I will take you up on this. How do I phrase this to the commuity? I am sure they have no idea what QAM signals even are!


Phrase what to which comunity?


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> Phrase what to which comunity?


MY Franchise Authority, like you just suggested....


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> MY Franchise Authority, like you just suggested....


What problem do you have? They want too much for the card? they insist you have programming you dont want? what?


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> What problem do you have? They want too much for the card? they insist you have programming you dont want? what?


Called my cable company today and asked for the cable cards. You need to subscribe to full cable (I only get basic) plus digital plus HD service. That would be an extra 65.99 a month. So how would I get assistance from the Franchise Authority as you had suggested.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> Called my cable company today and asked for the cable cards. You need to subscribe to full cable (I only get basic) plus digital plus HD service. That would be an extra 65.99 a month. So how would I get assistance from the Franchise Authority as you had suggested.


Find their address on your bill and write a letter, I'd suggest something like:

From: Rocko62580
100 Subscriber St
Someplace, XX 00001

To: Cable Franchising Authority
Town Hall
Someplace, XX 00000

Dear Sirs,

The FCC website tells me that you, the cable franchising authority for this community, is responsible for rates and enforcing FCC regulations with respect to basic cable access. I am having a problem with <cable co> not allowing me access to basic cable channels at the set basic cable rate.

Specifically Channel X WXXX-DT is carried by <cable co> as part of basic cable. I understand that FCC regulations mandate that the digital equivalent of the channels carried on basic cable also be part of basic cable. WXXX is carrided on basic cable, WXXX-DT is also carried.

However, to access this channel an access device "cable card" is required to be supplied by <cable co>. I understand that the FCC mandates that such devices be available to basic cable subscribers at nominal cost. <cable co> will not supply such a device to me, they insist that I subscribe to other tiers of cable service before I can have access to the device to properly receive basic cable.

In effect <cable co> wants to charge me an extra $65.99 for access to a device which the FCC mandates be available at nominal cost.

Please could you investigate this situation so that I may be able to access the basic cable channels that I should be able to.

Yours Sincerely

Rocko62580


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> Find their address on your bill and write a letter, I'd suggest something like:
> 
> From: Rocko62580
> 100 Subscriber St
> ...


WOW! Thanks! Did you just write that? If so that was pretty good!


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> WOW! Thanks! Did you just write that? If so that was pretty good!


Yup, I just wrote that. Its the sort of thing which was knocking around in my head when I thought I might have to write to my franchising authority.


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## Adam1115 (Dec 15, 2003)

btwyx said:


> Specifically Channel X WXXX-DT is carried by <cable co> as part of basic cable. I understand that FCC regulations mandate that the digital equivalent of the channels carried on basic cable also be part of basic cable. WXXX is carrided on basic cable, WXXX-DT is also carried.
> 
> However, to access this channel an access device "cable card" is required to be supplied by <cable co>. I understand that the FCC mandates that such devices be available to basic cable subscribers at nominal cost. <cable co> will not supply such a device to me, they insist that I subscribe to other tiers of cable service before I can have access to the device to properly receive basic cable.


I really am not following how you think this is going to work. What you say in your letter is simply not true! A cablecard is NOT required to access in the clear local channels. Any QAM capable TV or set top box can access it with NO problems! The cablecards purpose is to decode encrypted channels. The cable company is perfectly within their rights to deny basic cable users a cablecard, regardless of whether we like it or not! That is the WHOLE purpose of this thread.

The fact that the TiVo won't allow guide data on a digital channel without a cablecard is a limitation of the TiVo, not the cable company!!


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## Scopeman (Oct 22, 2002)

btwyx said:


> I don't think its arrogance, I wouldn't fancy the support headaches this would involve. As I've said many times, the problem's already been solved. Cable cards are the right solution for this.


CableCards are a terrible idea for this.

I get QAM locals and have no CableCards. All I had to due was file a lineup error report with Tivo explaining that the program data for my 6 QAM channels was missing. Tivo contacted the local TW office and got confirmation of what was on the channels (what local OTA channels they mapped to) and about 3 weeks later I had program data show up for my QAM channels.

There is no reason for it to be harder in any other market unless the local cable co chooses to be a pain.

But first you have to engage Tivo with a request to make the lineup correction.


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## Scopeman (Oct 22, 2002)

Adam1115 said:


> I agree, we are discussing a line up problem, cable company's offer QAM but to people who don't have cable cards it can't be recorded because there is no guide information.
> 
> Is anyone having what problem? Small cable companies aren't required to provide cable cards and the ones that do are charging an arm and a leg. What is a nominal cost? $150 might be to a small cable co that has to buy them, and pull half their crew off for a day to figure out how to make them work..
> 
> ...


See my previous post - you are correct that it is a lineup issue, but CableCard is NOT the right way to fix it. Just get Tivo lineup specialists in touch with your local cable co to get the right OTA channel mapping so Tivo can mirror the guide data.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Adam1115 said:


> I really am not following how you think this is going to work. What you say in your letter is simply not true! A cablecard is NOT required to access in the clear local channels.


This is true if the cable company publishes the QAM channel and subchannel onwhich you can receive it. If they do not, which is the common situation, like my cable co adverrtises 5-1 is on channel 705. You need to get a cable card to make it 705. The other purpose of a cable card is mapping QAM channels to advertised cable channels.


> The cable company is perfectly within their rights to deny basic cable users a cablecard, regardless of whether we like it or not! That is the WHOLE purpose of this thread.


I'll have to differ with you there, given the situation I outline above. If the QAM is advertised, you have a line up problem. If it is not you have a basic cable access problem over which the franchising authority has authority.


> The fact that the TiVo won't allow guide data on a digital channel without a cablecard is a limitation of the TiVo, not the cable company!!


Does you cable company publish the QAM channel/subchannel on which you receive the channel? That's the important point.


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Adam1115 said:


> The cable company is perfectly within their rights to deny basic cable users a cablecard, regardless of whether we like it or not! That is the WHOLE purpose of this thread.


The real question is whether you can persuade the franchsing authority that they are not within their right to do this, and how much notice the cable company will take of this. Both are interesting questions, which have not been answered.

The whole point off the thread is to get affected people TiVo service. One technical solution has been proposed. If there are better technical, or administrative solutions you'd be best off seeing if those work for you.

Does it matter how you get your TiVo service to work?


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## Adam1115 (Dec 15, 2003)

BTWYX-

Thanks, I follow your argument now! I'll have to check and see how mine remaps as I get my locals OTA.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

btwyx said:


> 1. Cable cards are mandated access method for accessing digital cable.


Of course not, but I suspect you know this. CableCards are a decryption device, and thus are only mandated for access control to encrypted services. The very reason that MSOs are not allowed to encrypt rebroadcasted OTA signals is to keep access to them available to basic cable customers without CableCards, which of course they are. TiVo can receive them just fine...the only issue here is that the TiVo guide is messed up. Your MSO has no incentive or mandate to fix your TiVo guide. In fact they'd just as soon not, to incentivize you to use their revenue-generating box.

TiVo, on the other hand, very much has an incentive to fix their broken guide.

You are tilting at windmills if you think you are going to convince an MSO to change their entire pricing structure to accommodate TiVo's broken guide. Forcing CableCards on basic cable customers just to fix TiVo's broken guide is hitting a very small nail with a very big hammer. Yes it works, but it's an expensive exercise in complete overkill.


Scopeman said:


> CableCards are a terrible idea for this.
> 
> I get QAM locals and have no CableCards. All I had to due was file a lineup error report with Tivo explaining that the program data for my 6 QAM channels was missing. Tivo contacted the local TW office and got confirmation of what was on the channels (what local OTA channels they mapped to) and about 3 weeks later I had program data show up for my QAM channels.


Now this is a much better idea than using CableCards...convince the MSO to include accurate PSIP data. In fact, this is the "right" solution here and is within the spirit of the FCC regs regarding rebroadcasting of OTA signals. The problem here is more of a practical reality...I am not interested in an S3 unless it can map local HD into the program guide, yet I'd have to buy one first (in order to be able to complain to TiVo customer support) and hope my MSO can be similarly convinced to fix their PSIP stream. That is a very expensive gamble. Also, the MSO doesn't create the PSIP data, it just passes along what it gets from each broadcaster, so you are relying on a long and complex chain to all "do the right thing" in order for the desired end result to occur (fixed TiVo guide). Good luck getting an MSO and 6 local broadcasters to listen to you or help diagnose problems...

I like the goal of fixing the PSIP stream, but the only practical solution in the short term (and a good backup plan as well) is to have a backdoor into the TiVo channel map so that our $800 investment isn't reliant on so many things outside of our own control.


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## sommerfeld (Feb 26, 2006)

Stormspace said:


> I was under the impression that QAM would be limited to broadcast stations only. Everything else would be encrypted. Is that wrong?


As I understand it, QAM is a modulation scheme allowing arbitrary bitstreams to be carried over various cable frequencies.

The bitstreams transported by QAM can be either unencrypted or encrypted. Unencrypted QAM streams can be displayed by a series 3 without help from a cable card; encrypted QAM needs the cable card's help for display.

A cable card, if present, tells the S3 how to map between QAM channel-subchannel pairs and the channel numbers used in program guide information.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

Nice summation sommerfeld.

Unencrypted QAM can be decoded/displayed by _anything_ without a CableCard (not just an S3). That's _why_ it's unencrypted...if CableCards were considered "necessary" to receive all digital cable programming, then all channels would be encrypted.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

mportuesi said:


> As I recall, QAM remapping is _your_ pet feature, not mine.
> 
> My "pet features" are either:


The difference, of course, is that _I've_ never advocated forcing you to spend more money to overcome your missing features.



mportuesi said:


> - bug fixes for debilitating flaws in the current software (toxic recordings, partial recordings) which have appeal to 100% of the user base


Baloney. Toxic recordings have affected a very, very small part of the user base. But that's the difference between us...even though things like this only affect a small minority of the TiVo family, I've never advocated _not_ fixing them. Of course TiVo should fix these bugs! And the QAM mapping problem too.



mportuesi said:


> - or Series 2 features that should be part of the product but aren't there (MRV, Tivo-To-Go) that have appeal to the vast majority of users.


Baloney. MRV does not appeal to the "vast majority", the vast majority do not own multiple TiVos. But again, that shouldn't keep TiVo from fixing _all_ these issues.

Your whole argument seems to be that providing a QAM map backdoor is so difficult that it will mean other things won't get fixed. That's absurd. For all you know, it's already finished, and the reason it's not activated yet is not even a technical one. And if it's not ready yet, it is not a difficult thing to do. Or are you saying that companies like Sony have such a talented group of engineers that they would dare approach the hopeless can of worms that is manual QAM channel mapping? I like to give the TiVo engineers a little more credit than that.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

Is it possible that cableLabs won't explicitly or implicitly approve Tivo software with QAM mapping?


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

That's entirely possible, and if that's the case than this entire conversation is purely academic

Or, maybe TiVo has it in the works, but left it out for the initial release and it'll hit in a future software update

Or maybe they didn't think anyone would want it, so just didn't bother... or maybe said nobody *should* have it and won't implement it...

and so on...


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## russwong (Sep 17, 2002)

I was on the fence of transferring my lifetime, but the need to use a cable card is unfortunate. I only record the broadcast clear QAM HD channels on my HTPC. I only have basic cable and adding cable card to the mix would just seem to complicate the situation. My TV can tune the unencrypted qam channels fine and map them to the TV Guide application that is part of the TV, I think it would be good if Tivo could do it. My HD Capture card has the ability to map the unencrypted QAM channel to the proper guide channels so I'm able to record via a guide on my HTPC. I already pay for the HD subscription, so why give Comcast more money if I don't have to?

Any real idea on if Tivo is every going to make this a feature, as now I'm starting to lean away from the fence of upgrading, especially at the $800+ tag.

Thoughts?

Russell


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

vstone said:


> Is it possible that cableLabs won't explicitly or implicitly approve Tivo software with QAM mapping?


Since other devices exist that are CableLabs-approved (complete with CableCard slot) and that do support user remapping of clear QAM channels into the guide (i.e. Sony DHGHDD250), it can't be a CableLabs approval problem.

My worry is that it's more of a "let's not p/o our potential Cable partnerships" problem. Your cable company would love to "force" you to upgrade to a digital tier+HDTV service+CableCards, just to be able to enjoy what you are already entitled to as a basic cable customer. TiVo does not want to step on any Cable toes, for risk of souring future partnership deals. Put the two together and you have the recipe for a missing QAM mapping feature...

Russell: welcome to our growing group! Be sure to lobby TiVo for this missing feature by going here to put in a feature request: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

Saxion said:


> Put the two together and you have the recipe for a missing QAM mapping feature...


A Conspiracy Theory - I wouldn't be too surprised. This sounds like a very likely scenario.

Let's say I'd rather have TiVo lobby for MRV/TTG (at least to other S3s, or at least of SD content) - and that is precisely what they appear tyo be concetrating on. On a prioritization issue - I'm completely in agreement, if that is what this is!


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

Everybody loves a Conspiracy Theory!

The QAM-frequency-to-channel-number mapping is this weird sort of backdoor that Cable can use to encourage upgrades in service, even though the reception of HD network rebroadcasts falls squarely under the basic cable mandate. I believe that Cable hates the fact that OTA rebroadcasts must be sent in-the-clear, and they would just LOVE to encrypt them, but of course they can't. So, barring that, they want to make it _look_ like you need to upgrade to Digital+HD service in order to receive these most popular of channels. And one of the ways they do that is to tie the channel map to the CableCard. (Another way is through marketing, where they avoid any suggestion that local HD rebroadcasts can be received in a Basic Cable package...notice how the HD locals are always, ALWAYS shown in the upgraded "HD" tier!)

It's almost like the FCC mandated in-the-clear transmission of HD locals but forgot about the channel numbering...if they had simply mandated that channel map data be available in the absence of a CableCard, we would not have this problem.


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

Saxion said:


> notice how the HD locals are always, ALWAYS shown in the upgraded "HD" tier!


My Comcast channel guide clearly lists the local HD channels as limited basic.


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

Huh... has Comcast become so large that their local branches have developed their own personalities?


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

c3 said:


> My Comcast channel guide clearly lists the local HD channels as limited basic.


Really! I stand corrected. Good for them.


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## vstone (May 11, 2002)

c3 said:


> My Comcast channel guide clearly lists the local HD channels as limited basic.


But that doesn't guarantee that the the cable system encyrtption is set up that way, whether or not on purpose.


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## Revolutionary (Dec 1, 2004)

Just want to chime in that I am another potential S3 owner who is on the fence solely because of the QAM issue. I couldn't give a rats ass about MRV or TTG. I care about where my money goes. Just because a person can afford something doesn't mean "just pay it" is always the most prudent or easiest choice.

I'm on Cox in NoVa. They broadcast all locals in the clear on QAM. They require a "digital gateway" fee PER CABLECARD ($6.95 for the first, $5.95 for additional), plus a $2 rental fee. They also require a service upgrade to their "digital basic" tier of service for $9.95 per month. I've talked to 3 CSRs on the phone, went in to the local office and spoke to a CSR and a manager, and sent several emails to the local regulatory authority. If I want to record 2 HD programs at once with a Tivo S3, I'm gonna have to shell out an extra $26.85+tax ($322+tax/yr).

The cablecard is itself provided at a nominal fee. It is the service that they "require" to use the cablecard that pumps the consumer. Cox uses the same "if you have HDTV/S3 Tivo, you can afford to pay for the cablecard" presumption to justify their greed. It doesn't look any better on TC users than it does on them. Let me decide what is a good use for my money, mkay?

Until the Series3 maps QAM channels like every other consumer device with a QAM tuner (like its an engineering nightmare to program an instruction that says "If guide says 'Record channel 5," then physically record channel 5.1"), one thing I *won't* be spending my money on is an S3.


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

vstone said:


> But that doesn't guarantee that the the cable system encyrtption is set up that way, whether or not on purpose.


I don't know what you're talking about. Local HD channels are not encrypted.


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

c3 said:


> I don't know what you're talking about. Local HD channels are not encrypted.


In some regions, unfortunately, some channels that shouldn't be encrypted, are. Someone has to complain to the cable provider &/or the local franhciser/FCC before that is rectified. And as alluded to by vstone ... it isn't necessarily intentional or malicious.


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## Saxion (Sep 18, 2006)

Revolutionary said:


> I'm on Cox in NoVa. They broadcast all locals in the clear on QAM. They require a "digital gateway" fee PER CABLECARD ($6.95 for the first, $5.95 for additional), plus a $2 rental fee. They also require a service upgrade to their "digital basic" tier of service for $9.95 per month.
> ...
> It is the service that they "require" to use the cablecard that pumps the consumer.


+1.

I have Cox too. Are they just the worst here or what? Exorbitant pricing model...they won't give you a CableCard without these service upgrades, but they can still claim that the fee for the CableCard itself is low!


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> The real question is whether you can persuade the franchsing authority that they are not within their right to do this, and how much notice the cable company will take of this. Both are interesting questions, which have not been answered.
> 
> The whole point off the thread is to get affected people TiVo service. One technical solution has been proposed. If there are better technical, or administrative solutions you'd be best off seeing if those work for you.
> 
> Does it matter how you get your TiVo service to work?


I just heard back from the Town Selectmen. They are forcing the cable company to contact me in regards to this. Will let you know what happens!


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

ashu said:


> In some regions, unfortunately, some channels that shouldn't be encrypted, are. Someone has to complain to the cable provider &/or the local franhciser/FCC before that is rectified. And as alluded to by vstone ... it isn't necessarily intentional or malicious.


Is this implying that unencrypted broadcast digital channels (and all subchannels?) is an FCC mandate?

I have been only giving the wishy-washy "it's a de-facto standard" because I haven't been sure it was an actual requirement.


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

mattack said:


> Is this implying that unencrypted broadcast digital channels (and all subchannels?) is an FCC mandate?
> 
> I have been only giving the wishy-washy "it's a de-facto standard" because I haven't been sure it was an actual requirement.


As I understadn it, at least the main digital channel broadcasts of the national big 4 are required to be free/included/unencrypted.


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## jaredmwright (Sep 6, 2004)

I just installed my TiVo Series 3 two days ago. Here are the problems I have had so far with relation to trying to access and use basic cable QAM Comcast channels:

1 - When running guided setup and selecting "cable" as the only option and typing in my zip code of "94565", the only channels that show up in the TV Guide once setup is complete are 2-73 in standard definition. No HDTV channels show up by default? (This makes sense because it did not scan for HD digital QAM channels from the cable, which I chase as the option) Why TiVo wouldn't scan digital channels by default on an HD device during setup is beyond me? Maybe it is a bug, or they rushed it out the door or didn't think about it? :down:

2 - In order to see the cable QAM HD channels in the TiVo Guide coming from Comcast basic cable for the big four networks and PBS, you must go into the Settings and scan the digital channels manually. When finished scanning, it does successfully detect all of the un-encrypted HD channels of the big four networks and PBS which I can tune to and watch in HD just fine. This scanning step wasn't obvious to me initially, since the included setup document didn't show this.  Here is my basic cable information:

Pittsburg, CA 94565 Comcast Cable (Basic) with local QAM Channels as of 12-1-2006 (Antioch, CA 94531 is also the same):

2-1 (KTVU-HD [FOX] = Ch2)
5-1 (KXTV-HD [CBS] = Ch5)
7-1 (KGO-HD [ABC] = Ch7)
7-2 (Non-HD KGO???)
7-3 (KGO Weather)
9-1 (PBS-HD)
9-2 (Non-HD PBS)
11-1 (KNTV-HD [NBC]= Ch11)
11-2 (KNTV Weather)

3 - Now after scanning manually, the channels show up in the guide and I can tune to them successfully, but no Guide data shows up? I assume this is because TiVo doesn't know about these QAM mappings for my zip code for these stations. Another reason I believe it doesn't pick them up is because you have to scan and add channels after having already run Guided Setup (which is when TiVo downloads the channel data for the channels it knows). Since it did not know about the QAM digital channels during setup, it fails to populate the fields properly. 

In talking with a TiVo technician after being on hold for over 1.5 hours  and getting disconnected twice, I found the following: He explained that the guide data for my zip code for the HD channels I have listed above is not in their system and this is why the Guide Data is not showing up. He put in a request to add the channels to the cable lineup for my zip code and he said it would take about 5 days to complete. He also agreed with me that it should scan for digital channels during setup and he would look into why it was not.

Others have talked about enabling channel mapping or a way to copy the channel guide data of a known channel to that of an unknown. I would be happy with either of these solutions or any other way to link two channels together or maybe simply replace the option to replace the SD channel with an HD channel of choice (like a substitution), since there isn't a need for both SD and HD of the same channel.

Overall, I am very happy with the TiVo Series 3 device. The quality is superb when recording and or playing back TV and the sound is phenomenal when using a 6.1 THX sound system as I am, plus it has the intuitive easy to use 'Wife' approved interface. 

I only have the following issues:

1 - The unit rebooted the second day when we were watching TV for an unknown reason around 8:30pm.  
2 - The unit does not play the TiVo "sounds" when fast forwarding/rewinding or accessing the Data Guide. (My Series 2 does this just fine as well as my DirecTV Series 2). I am using the Optical digital out connection to my surround receiver, which is the same way my DirecTV unit is connected. 
3 - Digital QAM guide data does not exist for any channels scanned? This defeats the purpose of being able to tune QAM channels since you cannot use Season Pass or any other of the features, it basically acts as a high tech VCR at this point in time for these channels. 
4 - There is no recycle bin
5 - No MRV or TiVo To Go
6 - eSATA is not usable

I understand this is a new device and I expect many of these fixes with a software update. I will update when/if the guide data gets populated for my QAM channels. If this will not be possible, I will be forced to use cable cards and spend more money monthly which I do not want to do. Sorry this was long winded, but I wanted to get this information out there for other people since many are on the fence and I want everything out in the open. I still recommend this device highly though! :up:


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

I wonder if those of us who know this stuff should just make it a practice to add the stations, figure out exactly what they are, and then submit them to TiVo...

They've got their Report a Lineup Issue form:

http://customersupport.tivo.com/LineUpForm.aspx

We could just figure it all out, get the exact frequencies, and in the "Any other info" just list them off...

Local HD stations over Cable do not show up in guide data.
QAM Cable Channel 119.2 equals OTA broadcast channel 3.1 
QAM Cable Channel 123.2 equals OTA broadcast channel 6.2
etc.

I'm open to suggestions/discussion on the best way to present/report this data to TiVo so that we're not giving them too much information but that they know what we're talking about and can get it done for us


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

jaredmwright said:


> I just installed my TiVo Series 3 two days ago. Here are the problems I have had so far with relation to trying to access and use basic cable QAM Comcast channels:
> 
> 1 - When running guided setup and selecting "cable" as the only option and typing in my zip code of "94565", the only channels that show up in the TV Guide once setup is complete are 2-73 in standard definition. No HDTV channels show up by default? (This makes sense because it did not scan for HD digital QAM channels from the cable, which I chase as the option) Why TiVo wouldn't scan digital channels by default on an HD device during setup is beyond me? Maybe it is a bug, or they rushed it out the door or didn't think about it? :down:
> 
> ...


Please let me know what happens! This may be the way to get it done, without buying the Cable Card!


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

Nobody's really followed up on this idea...

Is there any value in reporting our self-discovered QAM channel info to TiVo?


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

TydalForce said:


> Nobody's really followed up on this idea...
> 
> Is there any value in reporting our self-discovered QAM channel info to TiVo?


 It's not really valuable because:
1. Not all cable providers pass along the PSIP information such that you get the "friendly" channel numbers that look like the OTA counterparts as in the post above. 
2. Even for cable providers passing along PSIP information properly there are many other digital channels in the clear without PSIP information. It's expensive for cable companies to manufacture PSIP information themselves so most don't do it.

Without the PSIP information the Tivo has to tune to the RF+sub-channel for tuning which is why manual mapping to guide channels is needed without cablecards.


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## iMan3001 (Nov 29, 2006)

i would love to see this feature added also.


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

FWIW... my local broadcast HD stations were easily found on my TV (along with a bunch of digital cable channels)... 110.1 111.1 111.2 118.1 118.2 118.3 118.4 118.5 119.1 119.2 and have all stayed the same for the past 6+ months. I'm going to submit a report to TiVo via the channel lineup report page, and see what happens (c:


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## mattn2 (Mar 23, 2001)

TydalForce said:


> I wonder if those of us who know this stuff should just make it a practice to add the stations, figure out exactly what they are, and then submit them to TiVo...
> 
> They've got their Report a Lineup Issue form:
> 
> ...


Thanks for the pointer ... I plan on doing the above for the ONLY HD channels on my system (the big 4) when I get home tonight.

# Matt


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

I meant to do mine last night, and I started going through them to confirm, but I spent most of the night actually rewiring my so-called-entertainment center to hook up the S3, and then Heroes was on... 

I'll get to it. I promise!

Though, I think a degree of responsibility comes with this. QAM channels can switch whenever the cable company feels like it, so we have to

- Be aware that TiVo isn't responsible if the channels change and we miss programs
and
- Be alert to let them know if/when the channels change

With great power comes great responsibility. But I think this is one of those things that could be very useful. I'm still debating whether I want to bother, or just get a good antenna; but I'm gonna report it anyway.


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## joker81 (Nov 13, 2002)

I went to Comcast yesterday in Seattle and they told me I had to get a digital service to get the cards. Although I would rather have more channels in digital since the recording is better.


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

Well here is the message I recieved back from my cable company. I have to say that going to my town administrator speeded up the process, but it sounds like I still cannot get a cable card. 

Here is the reply. 
I spoke with the Town Administrator of &*(@#&*(@#@ regarding 
your
e-mail referencing WMUR's Digital transmission and the ability to 
receive
that channel. As you know MetroCast does offer this channel along with
several other channels offered in the Digital format. We do offer these
channels in the "clear", However if your television is not equipped 
with a
"qam" tuner than you will not be able to view them. Unlike analog 
channels,
this type of format is fairly new to the market and most TV's are not
equipped to support this. You are correct in stating the "FCC" requires 
that
cable companies offer this at no charge if the consumer has a 
television
that supports this format. Both the Cable card and a digital converter 
are
options to the consumer in lieu of having a television equipped with 
the qam
tuner. MetroCast offers either solution. The price quoted to you for 
the
cable card is a one time pass thru cost of the cable card and 
installation
charge. I would be happy to discuss any other questions you may have. 
Please
feel free to e-mail me or contact me at


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## greg_burns (May 22, 2004)

jaredmwright said:


> I only have the following issues:
> 
> 1 - The unit rebooted the second day when we were watching TV for an unknown reason around 8:30pm.
> 2 - The unit does not play the TiVo "sounds" when fast forwarding/rewinding or accessing the Data Guide. (My Series 2 does this just fine as well as my DirecTV Series 2). I am using the Optical digital out connection to my surround receiver, which is the same way my DirecTV unit is connected.
> ...


2 - S3 cannot play the TiVo "sounds" when it is also playing digital audio. This has been discussed before.

4 - S3 code s based off older S2 software. Recycle bin will be added during next update. Perhaps, the two will then remain at the same level going fwd.


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

Finally got off my lazy rump and sent in the info to TiVo

If anyone else does too, I gave not only the QAM frequency, but the local OTA frequency, equivalent Digital Cable channel, and callsign info... thusly:

118.1 = 6.1 / 231 / WPVIDT 6 ABC


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## btwyx (Jan 16, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> Well here is the message I recieved back from my cable company. I have to say that going to my town administrator speeded up the process, but it sounds like I still cannot get a cable card.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...


If I remember right:


Rocko62580 said:


> Called my cable company today and asked for the cable cards. You need to subscribe to full cable (I only get basic) plus digital plus HD service. That would be an extra 65.99 a month. So how would I get assistance from the Franchise Authority as you had suggested.


They wanted you to subscribe to extra packages. Now all he's talking about is an installation charge and a cost for the cable card, not for extra packages. Maybe you should clarify what costs he's talking about and ask him to install one without you subscribing to the extra packages.


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## mattn2 (Mar 23, 2001)

mattn2 said:


> Thanks for the pointer ... I plan on doing the above for the ONLY HD channels on my system (the big 4) when I get home tonight.


I have submitted the four ... now to wait the 3-5 days for a response.

# Matt


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

btwyx said:


> If I remember right:They wanted you to subscribe to extra packages. Now all he's talking about is an installation charge and a cost for the cable card, not for extra packages. Maybe you should clarify what costs he's talking about and ask him to install one without you subscribing to the extra packages.


Just sent her back an email. Your right, she did not say anything about monthly cost. WIll keep you updated!


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## TydalForce (Feb 9, 2006)

Ah poo, got a response....

Thank you for contacting TiVo&#146;s Channel Lineup Department. We have assigned case number <deleted> to your channel lineup report. Unfortunately we can not provide guide data for rebroadcast stations at this time. Such information as available could change without notice.

Was worth a shot.


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## dwynne (Mar 11, 2002)

Revolutionary said:


> Just want to chime in that I am another potential S3 owner who is on the fence solely because of the QAM issue.
> 
> --snip--
> 
> Until the Series3 maps QAM channels like every other consumer device with a QAM tuner (like its an engineering nightmare to program an instruction that says "If guide says 'Record channel 5," then physically record channel 5.1"), one thing I *won't* be spending my money on is an S3.


I am in the same boat. I would order one today, transfer the lifetime from my old SA Tivo, and be happy - IF the S3 supported channel mapping on clear QAM channels.

I am on lifeline (limited) basic with Comcast and get all the locals in HD in clear QAM plus some other clear QAM HD and SD stuff. In order for the QAM tuner to work for me in an S3 I would have to rent 2 cables cards ($10 per month plus tax for 2) AND likely upgrade to "digital tier" which may be $40-60 more per month.

Other than the scuttlebutt on the forum, is there any OFFICIAL word from Tivo that they acknowledge the problem and will craft a solution?

Thanks,
Dennis


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## ashu (Nov 8, 2002)

Dennis, the CC pricing as well as the 'being forced to get a digital tier' is not accurate with Comcast. Who's your provider? You may want to call/escalate/complain. 

Some people are paying $17 for basic cable, 2CCs and no addons!


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## russwong (Sep 17, 2002)

ashu said:


> Dennis, the CC pricing as well as the 'being forced to get a digital tier' is not accurate with Comcast. Who's your provider? You may want to call/escalate/complain.
> 
> Some people are paying $17 for basic cable, 2CCs and no addons!


The key word is "some" people.... also, it would seem a simple fix that could eliminate dealing with the cable company as a whole if they just added this feature. Where I am, Comcast requires that they come out and install the cable cards, that means taking a day off and hoping they get it right.... All of which could be easily avoided with a little software tweak. My HD capture card in my computer does it, granted it's not Tivo UI, but it's been good enough, sure would like to pull the trigger on this, but to spend $800 bucks and still have to hope the cable company gets it right, just seems more work then it's worth.


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## kjmcdonald (Sep 8, 2003)

moyekj said:


> Once again I must re-iterate: *Cablecards are not the only extra cost involved*. In order to get cablecards you must also subscribe to *digital cable* which is pretty significant cost on your monthly bill. If all you care about in digital lineup are the unencrypted digital channels then you could save a bundle per month by not getting digital cable service and not renting cablecards. For me that would mean about $17/month in savings on cable bill.


No I don't think so. You don't have to. The Cable Company might like you to believe that, but I think the exact opposite is true.

Just like the FCC requires Cable companies to offer the broadcast channels in a in-expensive package, I beleive they force the CC's to include the digital versions of these channels in the same package, and I could be wrong, but I think the CC's have to let you have the CableCARDs if you need them to tune in these digital channels that they have to provide in that 'cheap' package.

This broadcast basic package is usuallay $10 -$15/month I think, and while they may get $0 to $10 more for 2 CableCARDs, I don't think they should be able to force you to get those other packages and pay those other fees.

Someone who knows more about the FCC rules can correct me if I'm wrong though.

-Kyle


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## dwynne (Mar 11, 2002)

ashu said:


> Dennis, the CC pricing as well as the 'being forced to get a digital tier' is not accurate with Comcast. Who's your provider? You may want to call/escalate/complain.
> 
> Some people are paying $17 for basic cable, 2CCs and no addons!


As russwong said - "some people". The Comcast here is charging $5 per month per card "rental" (plus taxes) and may or not allow cards to be renter by folks on limited/lifeline basic cable. Also, there are lots of clear QAM channels available that are NOT included if you do have the cable cards = so you pay more and get less.

Then you add in all the folks having issues with the cards and it just gets worse.

It sounds like folks that want this to work "right" without a cable card are in the minority, everytime someone asks for Tivo to fix it a bunch of folks just tells just to shut up and rent cable cards. If that is the attitude at Tivo, then I suppose it will never get fixed properly.

Dennis


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## dwynne (Mar 11, 2002)

kjmcdonald said:


> This broadcast basic package is usuallay $10 -$15/month I think, and while they may get $0 to $10 more for 2 CableCARDs, I don't think they should be able to force you to get those other packages and pay those other fees.


If Tivo added clear QAM mapping, then we would not be forced to rent two cable cards to make it work. Why spend $120 + taxes extra a year for something that Tivo should have built into the S3 from the start?

Dennis


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## kjmcdonald (Sep 8, 2003)

Rocko62580 said:


> Well here is the message I recieved back from my cable company. I have to say that going to my town administrator speeded up the process, but it sounds like I still cannot get a cable card.
> 
> Here is the reply.
> I spoke with the Town Administrator of &*(@#&*(@#@ regarding
> ...


I realize now that this thread is a little old.

But I think actually he's wrong.

Your S3 (or any CableCARD ready TV *HAS* a QAM tuner. Getting a CableCARD isn't something you do when you don't have a QAM tuner.

Getting a CableCARD is what you do to make the QAM tuner work correctly with their cable system. For more advanced cable packages 'work correctly' does include decrypting encrypted channels. But for your purposes, 'work correctly' means accessing and interpreting the CableCo's channel lineup that is encoded in the the digital signal, that no QAM tuner can access without a CableCARD.

(Yes other tuners may be better at accessing the PSIP info that is in each channel signal - when they leave it in there, but That's different than the info the cable company sends out itself to the CableCARD and the STB's.)

A cable card is useless withouat a QAM tuner... So unlike a STB it's not a solution for those who don't have QAM tuners. He's just wrong on that.

-Kyle


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

dwynne said:


> Also, there are lots of clear QAM channels available that are NOT included if you do have the cable cards = so you pay more and get less.


Yes, but you're not subscribing to those channels in the first place.

I agree that supporting manual QAM mapping would be nice, but that would be an additional feature, not a "fix". I think the majority of S3 owners need CableCards for decryption as well, not just for mapping (including myself).


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## Rocko62580 (Sep 26, 2006)

OK. I just recevied a letter from the cable company here it is!

"It is my understanding that if you were to pick up the DVR from us that 
you would have to add Basic Digital Cable along with that. The price to 
add the DVR which would give you basic digital cable, dvr and all 11 
high def. basic channels would be $18.90/month. If you were to go this 
route I would be able to throw in a free installation at that time.

I did also speak with a couple of our technicians about the addition of 
TIVO. If you were to go with TIVO they stated that the unit does come 
with a built in tuner and would be able to pick up the high def off air 
channels for you without the cable card.

Let me know if you have any questions with this and I will try to 
answer 
them in a timely manner."


So do I need a Cable Card to record "in the clear" HD channels? I currently have a QAM tuner, so I know which frequencies to turn to!

Please help!


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## yunlin12 (Mar 15, 2003)

When I first had my cable cards installed, they didn't activate it correct, and all I could get was the OTA channels, but I was also able to get the HD OTA channels at the time. I think this answers the question, even with no authorization at all to decrypt any digital channels (including sub-100 channels here), the cable cards were able to do a channel mapping, and the S3 is able to tune to the correct HD local channels and receive them. I hope this is the case in other areas as well. I think this jives with reports from others in my area, that one can tune all the local HD channels using cable cards with basic cable alone.

Extending this a little further, if cable cards' decryption functionality is not needed in receiving local HD, and the only part that's necessary is for cable cards to map the channel, then can one cable card provide channel lineup to both tuners? I have not tried this when my cable card was pre-activation, but I think it would be interesting to try, and it would save people cost of an extra cable card.


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

Rocko62580 said:


> OK. I just recevied a letter from the cable company here it is!
> 
> "It is my understanding that if you were to pick up the DVR from us that
> you would have to add Basic Digital Cable along with that. The price to
> ...


It's my understanding that without the Cable Cards you will have no guide data for the QAM channels. This means that any recordings you want to do on those channels have to be manual recordings. You could not set up season passes or wishlists to record from these.


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## Mike Farrington (Nov 16, 2000)

Rocko62580 said:


> So do I need a Cable Card to record "in the clear" HD channels? I currently have a QAM tuner, so I know which frequencies to turn to!


While you can see the HD channels without a CableCARD, recording them is currently problematic. Since there is no guide data for such channels, you have limited recording options which nullify TiVo's user-friendliness. The whole point of this discussion is to get TiVo to better support QAM channels when not using CableCARD(s).


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

Mike Farrington said:


> While you can see the HD channels without a CableCARD, recording them is currently problematic. Since there is no guide data for such channels, you have limited recording options which nullify TiVo's user-friendliness. The whole point of this discussion is to get TiVo to better support QAM channels when not using CableCARD(s).


Is there an echo in here...here...here...


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## Mike Farrington (Nov 16, 2000)

Stormspace said:


> Is there an echo in here...here...here...


Hehe, it took me a few minutes to read the whole page. I guess I should have refreshed before posting.


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

yunlin12 said:


> Extending this a little further, if cable cards' decryption functionality is not needed in receiving local HD, and the only part that's necessary is for cable cards to map the channel, then can one cable card provide channel lineup to both tuners?


Yes, but I think only *after* the guided setup is run with two cards.


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## cogx (Sep 23, 2006)

dwynne said:


> If Tivo added clear QAM mapping, then we would not be forced to rent two cable cards to make it work. Why spend $120 + taxes extra a year for something that Tivo should have built into the S3 from the start?
> 
> Dennis


Wow, someone is still keeping up the good fight over this, a year later. I long ago gave up on it.

It is sad that it will never happen, because the programming logic of adding the extra channel-to-station guide data mapping should be trivial. We already have the guide data for our local broadcast stations in our S3. Those same stations are usually carried sans encryption on most of our cable systems, so we get the benefit of watching our local broadcast DTV, without having to worry about our own individual antenna reception issues.

Unfortunately, to make it useful to *record* those channels, instead of relying on our OTA antenna reception, we just need the most basic interface possible that just lets us associate those "extra" cable channels with the same guide data that ALREADY EXISTS in our system:

If we have this already in our system: 
antenna channel 3-1 ----> Guide data for KABC-DT 
cable channel 12 ----> Guide data for KABC-DT

We just need to be able to define this for ourselves, on the channel setup screen:
cable channel 113-2 ----> Guide data for KABC-DT

If I can pull up antenna channel 3-1 and cable channel 12 and get guide data for station KABC-DT, there is no technical reason why they can't allow me to ALSO link cable channel 113-2 to the same KABC-DT station guide data already there.

I don't know why people try to make this so complicated, why talk of CableCARDs always comes up. This has nothing at all to do with CableCARDs.


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## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

cogx said:


> Wow, someone is still keeping up the good fight over this, a year later. I long ago gave up on it.


Huh? You're the one that brought it back from the grave.



cogx said:


> cable channel 113-2 ----> Guide data for KABC-DT.


That can become 113-3 tomorrow, and you won't know about it until it's too late.



cogx said:


> I don't know why people try to make this so complicated, why talk of CableCARDs always comes up. This has nothing at all to do with CableCARDs.


CableCard handles the channel mapping automatically.


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## cogx (Sep 23, 2006)

c3 said:


> Huh? You're the one that brought it back from the grave.


Sorry about that, I had like 6 tabs open on different threads on the site and somehow ended up on this page and mistakenly thought it was active thread, not seeing no one had posted since January 07. Dumb, dumb, dumb!   

Ok, we'll leave the dead dog to RIP.

***** WARNING *****

**** DEFUNCT THREAD *****

**** WARNING *****

**** DEFUNCT THREAD ***** *​


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