Comcast San Jose Digital Conversion

[AcidReflux]

I have started receiving notices that Comcast is moving me to digital cable for free. I have a series 3 tivo with no cable cards.

My question is this, do I need cable cards to receive all the channels that are getting moved to digital? I do not have premium channels and I do not care about the on demand channel. My first guess is that I do not need them since the S3 can tune digital signals. However, I do not want the conversion day to come and find I can't receive channels. Does anyone know for sure?

[Stephen Tu]

You don't need cable cards to "receive" them. You can do a manual scan and pick up these expanded basic channels that are having their analog dropped, since they are being transmitted digital in-the-clear. However, it's a massive pain to record them since there is no guide data for those channels. (see huge thread (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=362736) complaining about Tivo's lack of clear-QAM capabilities). You'd be limited to manual records by time/channel only, no season passes, and no titles/episode data.

So I would recommend getting the cablecards. They should give you at least the first card free, if you aren't getting one of their "full-function" set-top boxes.

[AcidReflux]

Ugh, I was hoping that wouldn't happen. I'm going to have to think about this. Time to dig into the cable card threads. Thanks.

[mattack]

But if you have an actual series 3 (not a Tivo HD), you need TWO cablecards, regardless of type, for dual tuner functionality. With ONE cablecard, it can only record one channel at one (regardless of analog or OTA)