The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Cable Modem I-net Connection and Viewing Cable TV

Cable Modem I-net Connection and Viewing Cable TV

Can you somehow view Cable TV programming on a PC if it's connected to the internet via a cable modem? If so, is that legal? (I *do* legally subscribe to both digital cable as well as high-speed internet services.)

bob
Thursday, December 25, 2003

Can you not just connect the decoder box to your TV card instead of a telly?

Anon
Thursday, December 25, 2003

I do it all the time. Use a splitter to split the signal before the cable modem, and run the second cable to a TV-PC card.

Here is a site with some details and caveats:

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/cabletech

sgf
Thursday, December 25, 2003

Thanks!

bob
Thursday, December 25, 2003

My guess is that Bob is being polite, and what he's really asking is whether a cable modem can receive, and then software can demodulate, the digital cable signal for digital channels. I, too, have digital cable, and a cable modem, and have wondered the same thing, but would guess that the digital TV channels are encoded on entirely different frequency ranges.

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, December 25, 2003

Sure, it sounds similar to the telephone lines & DSL. Telephones run on frequencies up to around 20khz (the upper limit of human hearing), and the DSL runs above that. You put filters on all the regular phones to prevent the two from interfering with each other - noise that gets into the phone that's above 20khz, and artifacts of the digital noise that can disturb your phone calls.

Cable TV has been around long enough that my guess is the encoding standards were designed well before broadband, though if the company controls the decoder box (some demand you use their decoder boxes), they can use any method they want. Plus now there's digital cable, which would be different from analog cable.

Also with this digital cable, we have interactive programming - chose your show, and so forth.

So... In short, I don't know.

As other people have said, the best way would be to get a video card that can decode video. I have one and it's great. It's also fun to look at computer things on the television and see just how low resolution TV is.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, December 26, 2003