Premium Channels on the TV Tuner

OK, anyone that has digital cable with premium channels should know that in order to access those channels on your cable box, you have to tune in to channel greater than 100, say channel 401 for Starz on my cable network. Anyway, when I hook my express card hybrid digital/analog TV Tuner directly to the cable line, it gets the channels up to 76 as if I had basic analog cable. Do I need a cable card(If so, how do I hook it into my notebook?) or special Software?

Also, if I connect my TV Tuner to the cable line running from my Cable Box, would I get the requested channels?

 

The express card tuner cannot handle digital cable channels (those over 100 or 125). It CAN handle ATSC over-the-air digital broadcasts. The cable channels you want need to be converted to a standard analog signal (usually by a cable box) in order to be viewed through the express card tuner.

The big downside of that, is that you cannot tune the channel using the card's software. You have to select the channel manually on the cable box, and then leave the TV tuner card set to channel 3 (or A/V if you connect it using s-video/composite). It's not an ideal solution, but you can at least view the channels that way.

As for using a cable-card, there are solutions coming that make use of those. They will be an entirely different TV-tuner solution than they one you have, though, and some sources are saying that they will only be made available to OEMs, so getting one could be difficult. Either way, for now, the only choice is to use a cable box.

Hope that helps.

 

@ jadedraverla,

Yeah I was afraid of that. I just thought that maybe it was possible to find some 3rd party software than can scann and access the channels since its all digital.