Sage TV, HD Homerun and Comcast

[nagate816]

I have been a user of Sage TV for a couple of years now and love it. I have several HD Theaters that work really well.

In the Washington DC area up until a few weeks ago as a Comcast customer I could plug my cable directly into my SageTv PC with a coupe of Hauppauge cards in it and everything worked well (although not in HD, but even that was OK).

As of a couple of weeks ago Comcast has basicaly turned off the majority on cable channels until you get a mini cablebox and remote for every tv you have. Now at first I thought I would just need one of these boxes for each of the Hauppauge cards and I'd be set. I now am not sure about this as I think the boxes can only be "controlled" by the remotes which is not good.

As I am trying to avoid succumbing to this change I noticed that my digital TV now pick up a lot of new HD channels (although they are not in the usual positions on the dial and also have strange numbering, such as 78-103, etc.) I did a little bit of research here and other places and came across several references to the HDHomerun. I ordered one and what I have seen so far I REALLY like but I must be missing something. I have got the dual tuner HDHomerun setup and in their QuickTV Viewer both tuners "know about" all of the digital channels and actually remap them to the correct local channel numbers. When I go ino SageTV I can add the 2 new tuners but I am not able to see any picture on any of the channels.

What am I missing ??

Thanks,


Neil

[Tiki]

Have you followed the instructions for HDHR setup listed in the Sticky at the top of this forum http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35004?

Sounds like maybe you didn't scan for channels inside Sage.

[KarylFStein]

Just keep in mind that Comcast may start encrypting those channels soon. My letter from Comcast suggests that as it says that even TVs with QAM tuners, (which the HDHR has) will need a digital adaptor. The HDHR can't handle encrypted channels.

I just received my equipment today and last week sometime I noticed a lot of new QAM channels. I figure once everyone is migrated to the digital tuners, they'll turn on the encryption and you'll probably only get you local stations from the HDHR. Just a guess, though; hasn't happened here yet. But at if it does, at least you should still get local channels in HD with the HDHR.

I bought a USB-UIRT to act as a "remote" for the boxes Comcast sent. I haven't set anything up yet, but am pretty confident that it'll work.

[mechling-burgh]

I set up the cable boxes over the weekend using the USB UIRT and they work fine. I tried using the IR extension cable they give with the boxes but had better luck just sticking the IR emitters to the front of the box and placing electrical tape over them. Don't get me wrong I prefer not having to use them, but I would rather use SAGE over any Comcrap DVR box any day. The only reason I didn't consider switching to Dish, Fios or DirectTV was the two free boxes per house hold. I lost one tuner with this setup but it only cost me a USB URIT and couple of IR emitters to make it all work.

[KarylFStein]

Is there anywhere to get IR transmitters locally? I thought I had some from my old USB-UIRT days, but can't seem to find them. Probably re-used them when I moved to an RF remote in the living room, but could have sworn I had a couple extra. I was hoping to get this all set up Sunday when I had some free time as the USB-UIRT also arrived today a little after UPS dropped off the cable boxes, and the Comcast deadline is only a week and a half out...

[Fuzzy]

You can get the parts at radio shack. I think they sell a 2-pack of IR emitters, and you can get a headphone extension cable to something similar to butcher for it.. if you've ever touched a soldering iron, it shouldn't be to complicated. The pin info is available on the usb-uirt site i believe.

[Petrucci]

Originally Posted by nagate816

I have been a user of Sage TV for a couple of years now and love it. I have several HD Theaters that work really well.

In the Washington DC area up until a few weeks ago as a Comcast customer I could plug my cable directly into my SageTv PC with a coupe of Hauppauge cards in it and everything worked well (although not in HD, but even that was OK).

As of a couple of weeks ago Comcast has basicaly turned off the majority on cable channels until you get a mini cablebox and remote for every tv you have. Now at first I thought I would just need one of these boxes for each of the Hauppauge cards and I'd be set. I now am not sure about this as I think the boxes can only be "controlled" by the remotes which is not good.

As I am trying to avoid succumbing to this change I noticed that my digital TV now pick up a lot of new HD channels (although they are not in the usual positions on the dial and also have strange numbering, such as 78-103, etc.) I did a little bit of research here and other places and came across several references to the HDHomerun. I ordered one and what I have seen so far I REALLY like but I must be missing something. I have got the dual tuner HDHomerun setup and in their QuickTV Viewer both tuners "know about" all of the digital channels and actually remap them to the correct local channel numbers. When I go ino SageTV I can add the 2 new tuners but I am not able to see any picture on any of the channels.

What am I missing ??

Thanks,


Neil

I have Comcast in West Virginia and its very common to pick up extra HD content in the upper channel range 100 and up. Most of this content seems to be HD on-demand being pushed to other customers in the neighborhood. Its really kind of funny because you can watch a customer fast-forward and rewind to some of their favorite late night cinemax programming. I dont know if this is what your seeing in the upper channel range or not. Sometimes my HDHR will find and add these channels and then they will disappear soon after.

[mechling-burgh]

I made my own emitters, I had an old remote I took the emitter out of and bought one from radio shack. I then used an old stereo head set for the plug. I just soldered the emitters to the wire ends. This worked fine for me, the only thing I did wrong was I got the wires reversed on one of the emitters so I had to re solder it not a biggie. In Pittsburgh Comcast started to encrypt on demand about a year ago, so you can't watch other people streams anymore.

[nagate816]

.. and still no luck.

I can get the HDHR box to work - it picks up all of the channels that the Zap2It website says it should and I can watch them all in HD via the HDHR Qucik TV Program.

In Sage, the setup recognizes that I have the HDHR with 2 tuners and in setup I have it scan the channels and when it goes through it seems to be picking up channels (100+) and then I am able to go through and look at each channel and the codes it has assigned seem to be the same as the ones on the Zap2It website (which are the same as on the HDHR Setup program). I am also able to go to each channel and when I press preview I do not see any pricture but on all the channels it says the signal strength is between 80-100%.

Any other ideas on what I could be missing.

FYI .. I am using Windows 7 (64bit), 4GB RAM, Sage TV v. 6.6.2.218

Thanks,

Neil

[jasonl]

Check the Windows Firewall and make sure that the SageTV programs have network access. Since SageTV doesn't actually scan channels when using an HDHomeRun with digital cable (it imports them from a scn file generated by HDHomeRun Setup), it is possible to find channels and see signal strength but have the actual video stream blocked by the firewall.