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1. #DOES ANY TV TUNER FOR PC WORK WITH COMCAST OR XFINITY SOFTWARE#
2. #DOES ANY TV TUNER FOR PC WORK WITH COMCAST OR XFINITY WINDOWS#

The cable company then connects that particular card to your account and sends it a profile of what channels you are allowed to tune into.

They are added much like a customer-owned modem is, by giving the cable company some numbers on the bottom of the card that act as a unique identifier. It is to be paired with a CableCARD tuner and acts as the key to decrypt the encrypted television stations in your particular subscriber package.

#DOES ANY TV TUNER FOR PC WORK WITH COMCAST OR XFINITY WINDOWS#

But what is a CableCARD? In short, it is a small card that resembles a PCMIA expansion card – a connector that can commonly be found in older laptops (think Windows XP-era). Thanks to the FCC, cable television providers in the United States have to give their customers an option other than renting a cable box for a monthly fee – customers have to be able to bring their own equipment if they wish (they can still charge you for the CableCARD but at a reduced rate, and not all cable companies charge a fee for them). It was during this search that I learned a great deal about CableCARDs and the really cool things that they enabled. Only, I did not want to rent a Comcast box, so I went searching for alternatives.Įnter the elusive and never advertised CableCARD After a week of hell Therefore, I decided to sign up for it. One day I saw a promotion for currently subscribed customers for TV + Blast internet for $80, which was only about $20 more than I was paying each month for its Performance tier.

Further, the image quality for the HD streams, while much better than SD, was not up to par with the cable and satellite feeds I’ve seen.īeing with Comcast for Internet for about three years now, I’ve been fairly happy with it. Also, because it was IPTV, it was not as flexible as traditional cable as far as adding extra televisions and the DVR functionality. In the end though, after the promotional period was up, it got very expensive to stay subscribed to. It offered a lot of channels – with many in HD. While we did have some issues at first with the Residential Gateway and signal levels, it was eventually sorted out and it was an okay setup. U-Verse is an interesting setup of television delivery using internet protocol (IPTV). It was at some point thereafter, once she had caught up with as many seasons offered on Netflix of various shows as possible that she broke down and ordered U-Verse. She was probably the first one to feel the effects of a lack of new content – especially with a newfound love for a rather odd show called True Blood. For about a year we survived on Netflix, Hulu, and the various networks’ streaming videos on their respective websites but as the delays between a shows airing and web streaming availability increased and Netflix instant Streaming started losing content the price of cable started to look increasingly acceptable. In the future, it may not be that way, but I wanted to give some backstory and some personal thoughts on the matter to illustrate how I got into rolling my own DVR and why I’m excited about it (mainly: it saves money and is very flexible).ĭespite my previous attempts to “cut the cord” and use only Internet-based services for television, me and my girlfriend slowly but surely made our way back to cable TV. I will forewarn you that this article is quite a bit more informal than my usual writings, especially if you only follow my PC Perspective postings. Today we won't be talking about home theater PCs in the sense of a computer in the living room AV rack (Ryan covered that earlier this week), but rather a related technology that makes the HTPC possible: the CableCARD-equipped TV tuner. As a relatively new entrant to that area of tech myself, I was excited to cover it, and give you more coverage on a topic you wanted to see more of! I’ll admit that I was ardent about the prospects of talking HTPCs with you.

#DOES ANY TV TUNER FOR PC WORK WITH COMCAST OR XFINITY SOFTWARE#

You, our awesome readers, wanted to know more about the hardware and software behind them. We conducted a reader survey a few weeks ago, and one of the tech topics that received a surprising amount of interest in was HTPC coverage.