one tivo, two cable boxes?

[cthulhu]

i was wondering if two cable boxes can be hooked up to a single s2 dual-tuner tivo unit...my initial thought is no, but it never hurts to ask... =)

thanks!

[funtoupgrade]

Nope. Second input is raw cable only without box.

[ThatBozGuy]

Nope. Second input is raw cable only without box.


This is not quite a true statement, a second cable box CAN be hooked up to the tivo, but it would be pretty much useless except for manual recording, because the tivo can only control one cable box so it wouldnt be able to control channels on the second box which would only be available on channel 3 or 4.

I actually used this setup for a short period of time to capture quality recordings on channels 1-13 of my s2 dual tuner with northern california comcast dct700 cable line.

The quality of the raw rf coax(analog) line was really really bad due to low signal and line interference, alot of low channels(2-7) were very snowy and hard to watch, but they were clean on the digital feed,(comcast simulcasts digital and analog of the 1-99 channels). The pain of using the second cable box was no scheduling and so on, so it defeated the tivo s purpose.

So I dropped this setup of two cable boxes, I am back to using one cable tuner on composite and the bad raw signal on rf(the "normal" hookup), but I have now manually set the channels 1-13 to box instead of cbl in settings>channel list which means it uses the digital signal of the cable box for those channels for much cleaner general viewing, not only recording.

The only exception and work around I have to do occasionally is when two programs collide on the low tuner (channels1-99), because they are both on the cable tuner, I sometimes go back and switch the channel to cbl for the one that I dont care about quality on( say heroes versus local news or something) for that short period of time it uses the low quality rf signal.

This is going to become a much bigger issue for s2 owners in the near future (and already has in some markets like chicago comcast) as cable companies switch to all digital signals and drop analog, the dual tuner is going to be useless and it will only function as a single tuner unit.