Pretty OT for this forum....OTA HD receiver, hooked into cable TV?

[gastrof]

Did I hear correctly that some cable companies are sending OTA HD signals thru their cable "as is", not "translated" in any way? If that's so, would a regular OTA receiver be able to hook into the cable directly and get those OTA channels in HD?

I'd like to know ahead of time before tearing things apart and getting my second-hand unused HD tuner out of storage to try this out.

I do recall someone on the TiVo forums saying the above, however.

Anyone know anything?

[Dssturbo1]

most cable systems use unscrambled QAM and scrambled QAM compression to send their signals over the cable lines out to their customers.

It is different then the digital atsc signal sent out over uhf/vhf, so in that way it is translated differently then how you can receive local broadcast digital/hd stations using an antenna and atsc tuner.

Some cable companies do send the local stations hd channels over their cable systems as unscrambled QAM signals.

Your second hand used HD tuner would have to have a QAM tuner to pick these up.

some newer model hdtv sets also have built in QAM tuners.