Question about TV Tuners and my Cable Provider.

I have a nice desktop machine, and we just recently switched from Satalite TV to Cable TV (its cheaper I guess : \). With the change, we lost our Dish DVR.

So I got to thinking, We have digital Cable (150 channels) and we have a set-top Box given to us by our cable provider(5 dollars per month per box). I was wondering If I was to buy a TV Tuner, either internal or external (im not sure yet), would it be able to allow me to watch all 150 of my channels if I didn't have a set-top box?

Basically: If I put the raw cable signal into a TV Tuner device, would I be able to access all of my digital cable?

Note: Channels 1-64 are analog I think, they don't has as good as picture quality as anything between 65-150, and I think you can get them without the box directly to my OLD tv.

 

I use an external TV Tuner (WinTV USB2) and without plugging it into the set-top box, I can only get basic cable channels like MTV, Nickelodeon etc. If you want all your channels, including the premium ones (HBO, Showtime), you are going to have to hook it up to your set-top box.

 

I was actually poking around online for ideas myself - since I got a 16:9 screen, watching HDTV sounds like fun.
Doesn't look like Hauppauge's products would be right for me, and Pinnacle's HD Sticks don't seem to take coax cable input.
HALP!

 

Pinnacle's sticks do take coax, in fact all TV tuners take coax..

</me recommends u to gk AWAY from Pinnacle.... bad customer support/software... just crap stuff>

a) if u get a TV Tuner with ClearQAM, u can view unencrypted digital channels... most cable providers only give u the local+news channel(fox, nbc, cbs, cw....)on ClearQAM, so.... you have to connect ur TV Tuner to your cable box to get those encrypted channels, and u need to buy an IR Blaster so that ur TV Tuner can emulate ur cable box remote to change channel

b) different TV Tuners..
i) USB Stick... not recommended... they usually are the size of a USB drive, very portable, but no onboard hardware decoder= moderately medium/high CPU usage to decode
ii) USB box.... onboard hardware decoder, semi portable, good..
iii) PCI(internal) TV tuner.... mostly for desktops... good priced..
iv) expresscard... for laptops, not sure about these because i didnt look into them
v) SlingBox... external box, able to stream thru internet, kinda useful, but not very portable

AverTV and hauppauge seem to be good hardware

c) software used to record/view live TV
i) software from hardware provider.... i've used Pinnacle's TVCenter, buggy, slow on my C2D 2.4 4GB ram.. sigh...... 3rd party stuff like BeyondTV, ChrisTV, SnapStream... still kinda laggy compared to the option below
ii) Microsoft's Media Center(XPMCE or Vista Homepremium/ultimate).... i know this sounds weird, but Microsoft did good on their Media Center.... no lag, quick channel changing(compared to the programs in (i)), no fuss about hardware(except QAM, not that supported, only two hardware i know that supports QAM in MC is HDHomeRun and Volar Max)....

d) for most programs, analog/digital channels are recorded as native format(MPEG2 for analog, H.264 or MPEG2/4 for digital).... thus, (i love MIcrosoft's Media Center, so i'll keep referring to it from now on) MC uses low CPU usage when recording.... but this causes 2GB/hour(analog) or 4GB/hour(digital) for an hour's good recording.... hard drive space is cheap, but still, thats quite big... so get a big hard drive, or prepare to encode your recorded programs to better codec/lower bitrate..... a good program that helps is ShowAnalyzer or VideoReDo to edit out commercials (its like 1/3 commercial, 2/3 entertainment)...

im personally still looking for a USB TV Tuner, looking at AverTV Volar Max since it has ClearQAM that works in Vista Media Center....

check thegreenbutton.com for TV Tuner questions and news...