# Can I use a CableCard *and* an antenna?



## justrick (Dec 23, 2009)

I can't seem to find an answer to this...

I just ordered a TiVo Premiere. I'm planning to use a CableCard, which I know will give me two digital tuners...but can I also connect my antenna and get two OTA tuners (for a total of four)? Or is it strictly one or the other?

TIA!


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## SMWinnie (Aug 17, 2002)

Two recordings at a time. Cablex2, OTAx2 or one of each.


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## Tony Chick (Jun 20, 2002)

You can use both but you can still only record two things at a time. You just have a longer list of channels to choose from for each tuner. Even though there are four physical tuners, they are grouped together into two logical tuners, each having a cable and an OTA input.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

The cable cards do not give you 2 tuners, instead it grants access/decrypts those channels. The tuners are built-in to the Tivo. Cable or antenna are basically a source for getting your video. It can only record 2 channels at the same time, whether its 2 cable/antenna or 1 of each.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

Tony Chick said:


> You can use both but you can still only record two things at a time. You just have a longer list of channels to choose from for each tuner. Even though there are four physical tuners, they are grouped together into two logical tuners, each having a cable and an OTA input.


There are only two tuners, total, regardless.

The main reason for using OTA *and* cable card, is to access the much better picture quality of OTA for your local channels. It is extremely typical that the signal the cable company uses is a far lower bitrate than what you get OTA (as long as you CAN get OTA). OTA is also, theoretically (and in my experience), more reliable than cable, so there is less chance of losing a show due to an outage or problem.

This is exactly why I do it. And, yes, I went into the channel list and turned off the cable locals. And I do recommend trying it.


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

crxssi said:


> There are only two tuners, total, regardless.


Actually there are 6 tuners, 2 digital, 2 analog and 2 OTA.

they are grouped into 2 sets of (1 digital, 1 analog, 1 OTA)
for each set you can record/view off one tuner at a time, thus allowing for 2 recordings at a time from any combination of the 3 inputs(assuming you have cable card to provide the unencrypted digital stream to the digital tuners)

TiVo chose the above setup over the the Moxi approach of 3 digital tuners that can all record at the same time with no OTA and analog is a USB dongle if you want it.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

ZeoTiVo said:


> Actually there are 6 tuners, 2 digital, 2 analog and 2 OTA.
> 
> they are grouped into 2 sets of (1 digital, 1 analog, 1 OTA)
> for each set you can record/view off one tuner at a time, thus allowing for 2 recordings at a time from any combination of the 3 inputs(assuming you have cable card to provide the unencrypted digital stream to the digital tuners)
> ...


Thanks for the clarification.

The Moxi has no OTA????? Blech! Analog- well, that is mostly dead, so it doesn't matter anymore.


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## SoBayJake (Feb 6, 2002)

crxssi said:


> Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> The Moxi has no OTA????? Blech! Analog- well, that is mostly dead, so it doesn't matter anymore.


There are still a number of cable systems out there that still are analog and digital (2-99 are analog), having not moved to all digital. Some systems are all digital, and some simulcast both analog and digital for the same channel.


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## Mike Wolf (Sep 19, 2010)

crxssi said:


> Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> The Moxi has no OTA????? Blech! Analog- well, that is mostly dead, so it doesn't matter anymore.


Thats exactly how I feel, analog pretty much is dead (IMO) and asI said in annother thread, OTA isn't the best thing in the world to people who actually watch digital tv and not just ABC, NBC, CBS, CW, FOX, PBS.


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## greggt007 (Dec 9, 2005)

SMWinnie said:


> Two recordings at a time. Cablex2, OTAx2 or one of each.


OK, I know this is the premier forum, but i cant find the answer I am looking for. I recently got another S3 OLED box. I have one mcard in it and had one tuner. too cheap to pay another 4.95 on fios for another one. then decided to also hook up antenna. thinking, like you said above, one of each will work. however, i can tune to both fine, as in i can go to 8-1 antenna in guide and 508 in guide and both are nbc hd. but i cannot record both of those and it is not dual tuning. so is this quote above correct, or can it only dual tune with a single source?


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

greggt007 said:


> OK, I know this is the premier forum, but i cant find the answer I am looking for. I recently got another S3 OLED box. I have one mcard in it and had one tuner. too cheap to pay another 4.95 on fios for another one. then decided to also hook up antenna. thinking, like you said above, one of each will work. however, i can tune to both fine, as in i can go to 8-1 antenna in guide and 508 in guide and both are nbc hd. but i cannot record both of those and it is not dual tuning. so is this quote above correct, or can it only dual tune with a single source?


The original Series 3 TiVo works a little differently than all the models that came after it.

It is a dual tuner unit and for cable requires 2 cable cards. With 2 cable cards you can record one cable and one OTA at the same time. Also if you were not using cable at all and had no cable cards in it, you would be able to record 2 OTA channels.

But for some reason if you only use one cable card along with cable being limited to one cable channel it also limits your ability to to record OTA to one channel also (either one cable *or* one OTA not one of each). Sorry no known fix for this issue and as I said it only pertains to the original Series 3 unit as all the units since only require one cable card.


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## greggt007 (Dec 9, 2005)

wow, ok thanks for the response. makes no sense to me. not sure why the s3 would even offer in guided setup antenna + cable when it detects only one cc.
odd that i can get more functionality out of it if i take out the cc, as i primarily use it to transfer recordings to/from and watch on my other tivo. too bad i wont be able to watch hbo on it though and i might have to invest in a better antenna then as i dont get nbc right now.



atmuscarella said:


> The original Series 3 TiVo works a little differently than all the models that came after it.
> 
> It is a dual tuner unit and for cable requires 2 cable cards. With 2 cable cards you can record one cable and one OTA at the same time. Also if you were not using cable at all and had no cable cards in it, you would be able to record 2 OTA channels.
> 
> But for some reason if you only use one cable card along with cable being limited to one cable channel it also limits your ability to to record OTA to one channel also (either one cable *or* one OTA not one of each). Sorry no known fix for this issue and as I said it only pertains to the original Series 3 unit as all the units since only require one cable card.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

*greggt007*: I re-read my post and want to make sure I was clear:

With 2 Cable Cards the original Series 3 can:

Record 2 cable channels at the same time *or*
Record 2 OTA channels at the same time *or*
Record 1 cable & 1 OTA at the same time

With 1 cable card the orginal Series 3 can 

Record 1 cable channel *or*
Record 1 OTA Channel

and again if there are no cable cards it can record 2 OTA channels at the same time.

Good Luck,


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

ZeoTiVo said:


> Actually there are 6 tuners, 2 digital, 2 analog and 2 OTA.


Actually the analog "tuners" are built into the cable tuners. The software can detect the modulation of the signal and if it's analog it passes it through an MPEG-2 encoder for digitization.

The only reason the Elite/XL4 units don't support analog is because the chipset TiVo uses can only encode 2 analog streams at a time and they didn't want to deal with the hassle of asynchronous scheduling.

Dan


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## agredon (Jul 26, 2011)

My question is: Why did they group the tuners like that? In the days before the XL4/Premiere 4, ungrouping the tuners would have created a 4-Tuner (2 Cable + 2 OTA) TiVo at little to no additional cost, and they could have advertised it like Uverse does: "Record 4 shows at once, instead of only 2 with your cable DVR."


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## SoBayJake (Feb 6, 2002)

In the older models, and most likely the newer ones, each "tuner" could only do one thing at a time. When the tuner was used for OTA, it couldn't be used for digital cable at the same time.

There aren't actually 6 tuners in the box, there are actually 2, each of which can do 1 of 3 things at any given time.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

SoBayJake said:


> There aren't actually 6 tuners in the box, there are actually 2, each of which can do 1 of 3 things at any given time.


There are actually 4 physical tuners in the Premiere, 2 cable and 2 OTA. The XL4 uses the same basic hardware except it has 4 cable tuners instead of two of each. I'm 99% sure that it would be possible for a Premiere to record 4 things at once, two from cable and two from OTA, but its limited by software. Enabling a Premiere to act as a 4 tuner box would not only be really confusing to the user, since you could only record 4 things if two were cable and two were OTA, but it would also require some asyncrounous scheduling logic that's probably not very graceful to impliment in code.

Dan


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

Dan203 said:


> Enabling a Premiere to act as a 4 tuner box would not only be really confusing to the user, since you could only record 4 things if two were cable and two were OTA, but it would also require some asyncrounous scheduling logic that's probably not very graceful to impliment in code.
> 
> Dan


All DVRs with more than one tuner surely should use some kind of asynchronous code anyway. And the user interface should be another asynchronous thread. A TiVo should be full of asynchronous multithreading, which is presumably why they had so much trouble with Flash. And yes, such code is not easy to write and debug.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I meant ansyncronis in that you can have 4 things scheduled to record, but only if two are from cable and two are from OTA. The software would need to pay attention to the source of all the programs it scheduled rather then just saying no more then X recordings can happen simultaneously. They had something like this in the S2DT boxes and I remember one of the TiVo employees mentioing that it was difficult to accomplish. And since the last unit to use that logic was the S2DT they probably never bothered to port it to the Premiere codebase. 

Dan


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