[mythtv-users] multiple tuner question

[Ray Olszewski]

At 01:00 PM 6/18/2003 -0500, Richard J. Finn wrote:

>         Would you also need multiple cable set top boxes to make such an 
> arrangment work, or just a coax cable splitter?

That depends on what sort of cable service you have.

If you have digital cable (or digital anything), you need one set-top box 
per tuner. In fact, calling the cards "tuners" is in this case misleading, 
because they will get their signals (in all likelihood) through the 
Composite or sVideo input (or, just possibly, on channel 3) and need to 
control the external boxes to change channels (don't ask; search the archives).

If you have any reasonably standard analog cable, you don't need any 
set-top boxes (except maybe for PPV and such). Tuner cards can receive the 
usual ranges of cable frequencies (excluding a couple of rare exceptions 
that have ONLY Composite and/or sVideo ports). There may be exceptions to 
this, but I don't personally know of any.

Finally, you may have a mixed system -- analog plus digital. That's what I 
have, for example, and here I need a digital set-top (actually, it's way 
too big for "set-top" use) box to get the digital channels (>100, 
approximately) but can receive the analog channels on any reasonably modern 
TV, VCR, or video-capture card.

Oh, one closing thought ... with analog cable, each 2-way splitter reduces 
the signal strength to each connection by about half (-3.x db). Split the 
signal too much and it starts to look like 1950s broadcast quality. I don't 
actually know what splitting does to digital quality, but I'd guess that 
digital is all or nothing ... if the signal is strong enough it is clear, 
and if it is not there is no picture ... just a guess, though.

[old stuff deleted]