Open letter to Question House concerning cable TV
The cable guy just came by and installed digital. Here is a letter I wrote to my household to let them know of the inconvenience this progress will bring us. Anyone else out there dealing with this issue?
Hey all, I have some good news and lots of annoying news.
The good news is that we now have digital cable. As far as I can tell, this gives us two things: 1) Several channels that we didn't have before including history, biography, and a bunch of digital music channels 2) Analog is going away so we have to do this in order to keep watching TV
Here are the annoying things:
- The media PC TV guide no longer works, we have to keep the media center on channel three
- The guide now goes through the cable box, which means that
- We have to use two remote controls
- There is a pause between pressing buttons on the cable remote and seeing it on the screen. I'm told this is because of our setup and if we were using a regular TV, the response would be immediate
and most important
Everything we have set to record via the media center will now fail
We have to tell the media center to record to channel three and then tell the cable box to record what we want. We can no longer let the media PC find the show whenever it is on and record it. In fact, we probably want to double-check our recording settings every week to make sure they are what we want, until we get the hang of this.
Fortunately, most of the series we want are about to go on summer hiatus, so that buys us some time to find a better solution or pester the cable company to provide a better solution.
I'm told one of the issues is that our tuner card is analog and not digital, but it is hard to say if it would make a difference right now, it sounds like the cable company is pushing having the signal translated through their box.
This might be a good time to get into the habit of watching hulu, netflix on demand, etc. Of course, if that is so, I'm no longer sure what the point is of having cable at all anymore, since most of what we watch is pre-recorded.
Hey all, I have some good news and lots of annoying news.
The good news is that we now have digital cable. As far as I can tell, this gives us two things: 1) Several channels that we didn't have before including history, biography, and a bunch of digital music channels 2) Analog is going away so we have to do this in order to keep watching TV
Here are the annoying things:
- The media PC TV guide no longer works, we have to keep the media center on channel three
- The guide now goes through the cable box, which means that
- We have to use two remote controls
- There is a pause between pressing buttons on the cable remote and seeing it on the screen. I'm told this is because of our setup and if we were using a regular TV, the response would be immediate
and most important
Everything we have set to record via the media center will now fail
We have to tell the media center to record to channel three and then tell the cable box to record what we want. We can no longer let the media PC find the show whenever it is on and record it. In fact, we probably want to double-check our recording settings every week to make sure they are what we want, until we get the hang of this.
Fortunately, most of the series we want are about to go on summer hiatus, so that buys us some time to find a better solution or pester the cable company to provide a better solution.
I'm told one of the issues is that our tuner card is analog and not digital, but it is hard to say if it would make a difference right now, it sounds like the cable company is pushing having the signal translated through their box.
This might be a good time to get into the habit of watching hulu, netflix on demand, etc. Of course, if that is so, I'm no longer sure what the point is of having cable at all anymore, since most of what we watch is pre-recorded.