Live TV jumbled on some channels

[smithochris]

Hi,

I recently moved and have switched cable providers. I am trying to set up GBPVR again. It was working perfectly before, but now Live TV has many channels that are just fuzz or a bunch of lines. The audio sounds fine on most of these channels as well. Previous recordings still play back fine... Any ideas? I just upgraded to 97.13, but it didn't fix the problem. I could have sworn that I read about someone else with this problem on the forums, but I can't find the thread now. Thanks

[sub]

Can you post a screenshot or two so we know exactly what you mean?

[smithochris]

Here is a screenshot of the garbled image.
[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

[sub]

It looks like your new cable provider scrambles there signals to stop users tuning in the channels without renting a cable box. This is fairly standard in all parts of the world except the US, where it is only done by a few cable companies.

This specific scrambling looks like 'sync suppression'.

To check, you could try pluging the cable directly into your TV, and try tuning the channels in. It'll most likely look exactly the same.

If I'm correct, the only option will be renting another cable box, and using an IR Blaster to control it. Sorry!

[smithochris]

I tried plugging the cable directly into the TV, and it does do the same thing. I called Comcast and they said that they scramble all of their channels, and the only way to view them is to rent another cable box. That is sooo annoying. I was surprised because Comcast is a major cable provider (in the northeast anyway), and I haven't read of other people dealing with this issue at all. I guess everyone just rents another cable box...

[leftistcoast]

I actually had the Comcast guy out here at my place in Southie (South Boston) and he told me that they've only been scrambling in Boston for the last year (since August '05). And it's just in Boston, not Cambridge (where I moved from and didn't have a problem seeing all the channels with gbpvr). Apparently, Comcast has had a huge problem with Northeastern Uni students stealing cable. The security on campus wouldn't let them in the buildings to shut it off so they just started scrambling all but the lower 14 channels. He told me the same thing (get another box to run the signal through before going to the media center). I'm not interested in dropping another $7.50 a month to rent one. Especially since he told me that they will NOT activate the serial ports on the back of the motorola boxes to let your pvr change the channels...the idea of having to set up IR blasting while in the midst of law school right now is not a joyful one.

On the upside, tuner cards with built-in descramblers do exist...except, per the tech, they aren't available to the general public (shocker). Guess it's time to get a parttime job at Comcast...

Anyone had any luck with any descrambling software?

[sub]

There only descrambling software I've seen for this common analog scrambling techniques only works with older bt8x8 chipset capture cards. This sort of software works on raw video produced by these cards, rather than the MPEG2 you get from modern cards.

The other approach often take by people is to "repair" the signal before it gets to your video capture card. This involves added the sync back into sync suppressed video. From memory you should try googling for 'sync suppression 3-chip' or something like that.

In general, I think this is too much hassle for most people to bother with.