Cable company moving off of analog, will my HTPC still work?

Question

I have an old plan with my cable company, we receive their "Basic TV" package that has analog channels plus the unencrypted local network HD channels (NBC, CBS, etc.). We have an HTPC I built a while back that has a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Media Center Kit Dual TV Tuner, which supports the following standards:

• ATSC
• ClearQAM
• NTSC

The cable company called and offered a good rate for digital TV, but it would require getting a cable box. My question is, would our HTPC still work with the digital TV setup? (I asked the guy on from the cable company on the phone, but he was a salesman and not a technical guy, so he wasn't very helpful.)

Right now the coax cable comes in from the wall, into the HTPC, then an HDMI cable to the TV. My hope is that with the cable box I would be able to have the coax cable coming in from the wall go into the cable box, then from there into the HTPC, then the HDMI to the TV.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your tuner won't be able to "tune" the digital signal offered by the cable company, so you'll need to let the digital set-top box they provide do that, and then pipe it's output into the HTPC as a line-in.

Once you set it up like this you won't be able to tune the signal with your tuner anymore, so you won't be able to change channels directly with the HTPC. To do that, you'll need an IR Blaster to control the set-top box's channels (etc.) from the HTPC.

If you actually bought the WinTV-HVR-2250 Media Center Kit version of that card (and not just the stand-alone card version), then it should have included at least one IR Blaster in the kit.