Cable Box and OTA HD TV

If we live in an area that a simple HD antenna can get all the local HD channels, it’s great to have. If we signed up with a cable company and they only give us the standard DVR box, the quality of the pictures will be horrid and most of us will have to shell out $10/month per box for the rest of our lives to get better quality pictures with HD digital box. To make sure we have to get HD boxes the service technician finished setting up with only channel 3 on our original remote, and nothing else, he deleted all the channels we had before and only leave the channel that the DVR will talk to: 3.

low quality

We got the triple play package promotion for $99 from Comcast, the main reasons were phone and internet, the TV was just extra. We love our OTA (Over The Air) HD channels, they’re so clear and real HD.

OTA quality     OTA quality pictures

Since the TV only has 1 antenna input, we need to get 2 signals to our TV : OTA and cable box. Well, we found an old antenna splitter and it works extremely well. The only thing different is that from 1 to 2, we use it as from 2 to 1 : cable box and OTA cables connect to the outputs of the splitter and the input of the splitter is connected to the TV.

TV antenna splitter     OTA source

cable box out     Cable and OTA

After all the hook up, we need to run autoscan the channels again to add all HD channels to our TV. Channel 3 will be for cable box channels and all the other channels are for OTA. The kids watch the non HD Cartoon Network and they don’t really care about the picture quality from the cable box, we get our great HD pictures from our favorite local channels. Everyone is happy.

2 Comments

  • There are 3-colored cables going from the cable box. Are they going to your television’s inputs? If yes, I think you could just remove the coax cable from the cable box to your television and just run the antenna cable to your TV. To watch the cable box, just hit the “AV” or “Input” button on your original television’s remote or on the television control panel.

    • Arseniy,
      I did try that and the basic cable box doesn’t output to RCA jacks for some reason, I don’t want to spend money for digital box. Thanks,

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