issues with analog tv channels over broadband

kevinHealy · Post by **kevinHealy** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:49 pm

Background: I live in Manhattan, NYC, and I get absolutely zero over the air channels in my coop due to all the skyscrapers around me. However, I am a Time Warner broadband internet customer, and I found that to get affordable cable TV, I can take the existing coax cable, put a splitter on it, and pipe one output to my cable modem but the other output to my A/V system. This works because even tho I am not a TW cable tv customer, they still broadcast some analog tv channels down the wires.

The analog channels here in Manhattan that TW broadcasts in the clear are 2-14 (the main broadcast networks, plus some worthless spanish channels, plus PBS at 13 and the Food Channel at 14), a few in the 20s (e.g. a public one at 21 and TBN? at 22), plus a few more higher number channels (e.g. a CUNY station at ~50?).

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Issue #1: bad quality reception now
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I used to get good to excellent reception on all the aforementioned channels UNTIL a few days ago. At that time, some channels entirely disappeared (e.g. 13 became a blue screen on my TV), and several others (e.g. 2) became extremely noisy, with ghosty/wavy/doubled images. I did nothing to change my cabling, A/V system, etc around this time, so I am pretty sure that the issue is not my fault, but is something with TW's signals.

Does anyone know what happened? Is TW now trying to shutdown these analog channels?

Or maybe there is simply local damage to my building's cables or something. If this is true, does anyone know how safe it would be to call TW and complain about the bad channels?

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Issue #2: access to some more channels
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Besides the aforementioned channels, the only other ones that I want access to are the History, Learning, Discovery, Animal Planet, and SciFi channels (I really could care less abou the premium channels). These have always been corrupted by TW using some sort of analog scrambling, I presume, based on the fact that the audio sometimes comes thru and the video is sometimes black, then sometimes wavy and ghosted.

I have the 1986 edition of this book
http://www.amazon.com/Video-Scrambling- ... 0750699450
but have not had the time and equipment to investigate what TW is doing, nor bought the new edition.

So, I am curious if anyone has had any success with liberating TW's analog scrambled channels (e.g. using the techniques described in the above book), or if anyone has bought an unofficial descrambler box that worked.

If TW would simply offer decent internet and catv rates, and offer privacy safeguards on their set top boxes, I would not even bother with this...

By the way, I am not sure if this is the best forum to post these questions in. Much apologies if this is out of line. And if any of you have a better suggestion of a web forum, internet newsgroup, etc, please let me know and I will gladly repost.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 7:42 pm

You want basic cable for free, sorry but we dont deal with lillegal stuff here.

From what I understand, you can get the local channels or analog ones off the modem line because thats jsut how they are sent and cable companies dont care to change it cuz theres really no revanue(sp) lost.

Signal from those may be worse now because of the cold weather.

travis2144 · Post by **travis2144** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:26 pm

futhermore, those channel are being blocked out by a device on your line that is eliminating those analog signals form coming down your line with any type of usable signal. the only thing you can do is pay for the service so they can remove the trap and allow the rest of the signal for those channels through