Get HD without a cable box

by dez on September 4, 2009 · 2 comments

in Personal

I’ve become annoyed recently with commercials for Comcast about how to get HD television on your HD television set. The point is that the commercials say that in order to receive HD broadcasts you must get the HD box from Comcast. While this is true for their digital package channels and subscription based ones, (HBO, Showtime, etc…) it is not true for the standard channels (2-99). You can easily get HD without paying a single extra dime for service.

How do you do this? Easy, instead of plugging in the cable box into the TV, just plug the coaxial cable coming from the wall straight into the TV or converter box. Then have your TV go through the channel finder to find all the channels. Done. That’s it. Simple right? Keep in mind that your TV will require having an already installed digital tuner(installed by the manufacturer.

I should also disclose that you won’t get the fancy channel guide or reminders that come with the cable box, but you’ll also be saving $7/month. I’ve been doing this with my service for over a year now, and have never had a problem getting the channels, and I don’t pay for a cable box. This is a fix for those that aren’t using the DVR service or that want the on demand movies (use netflix instant or a roku box so you have access to amazon rentals as well).

Yes, I know there’s a lot of caveats, but the misinformation out there was annoying me, so I figured I’d share.

Tagged as: wow

  • http://reubencollins.blogspot.com Reuben Collins

    My wife and I bought an HDTV a few years ago. We plugged the thing in and hooked up the cable but we couldn’t find any HD channels. It was really frustrating. We knew we needed to look for the HD channels on things like 4-1 and 4-2, so we’d punch those numbers in but it wouldn’t find anything. All the channels that our friends were saying they were getting in HD, we would punch in the same numbers and not find anything. FRUSTRATING. We forgot about it for over a year and then we tried running the channel finder. When we did that, all the HD channels popped right up. I don’t know why it didn’t work to just punch in the number before running the channel finder, but it didn’t.

    So that’s my story. Also, we only get maybe a dozen HD channels. Is that what you’re getting as well?

  • http://iamdez.com dez

    Right now the non-filtered digital list from Comcast is only about a dozen channels or so (4-1, 5-1, 9-1, etc). I say ‘un-filtered’ because as they switch over from analog to digital channels they are scrambling the signal which requires a filter adapter.

    The reason you had to run through the channel finder is because the new digital signals work different than the channel signals.

    Previously when you entered in a channel number your tv looked at the stream of information coming in and focused on that area. Now the channels are matched to the signal area by the receiver which is why you can’t just type in the number before running the channel finder (at least this is the way that I understand the process).

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