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confused about HDTV

redd38

Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2001
Messages
517
Sorry about my ignorance but I'm confused about HDTV. If I order an HD tier from my cable company and get an HDTV cable box from them do I still need a tuner card with QAM decoding? Is the signal coming out of the HDTV cable box still encoded? If so then what is the box for? Or is the QAM decoding on some cards just for getting HD without using the box? And finally, for a more concrete question... if I order HD and get the cable box what card should I buy?
 
The problem is there isn't a good way to transfer the HD video from the cable box to the HTPC. There isn't a practical way to receive HDCP protected HDMI or DVI signals, nor is there a good method for component input. Your input options are really limited to a QAM decoding tuner, an ATSC decoding tuner, or a NTSC tuner that will accept Coax, Composite, or S-video.

*SOME* cable boxes will have an active firewire port through which you can transfer HD video, but I believe this is still quite hit or miss, and I am not terribly familar with which models. AVSForum might be a good place to research which cable boxes have active firewire ports.
 
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