Did you know you can pull digital channels for free off of basic cable (Comcast) if your HDTV has a QAM tuner?

I had read about this before, but hadn't tried it 'til last night.... (we have the HDTV set up primarily for XBOX... the watchin' TV is in the main room).... we get all of the HD local channels (though some are up in the 100-XX range) plus a bunch of other digital versions of basic cable channels, and then also movieplex and a slew of digital audio only channels. Analog count:37, Digital Count 96. Sweet!

The answer is: maybe. Most cable carriers were not prepared for QAM tuners to start becoming so common. I hooked my TV up here, not to Comcast, and let it search, and it found 367 channels. My landlord, whose cable I'm tapping off of, is only paying for basic cable. I get all the locals in HD, Comcast Sportsnet, ESPN, a bunch of junk I don't want/need. All the regular cable channels come through in digital, too, which is nice. And all the Music Choice channels, bonus.

NOW, the caveats are these: 1. It's going to go away. Sooner or later, every single channel except locals will end up encoded, and will require you to have a box. When? No one knows! Since the number of people with QAM tuners is relatively small, carriers don't really seem to care yet, and it'll be expensive to start encoding everything. But it's coming.

2. Cable boxes sort all those channels out and give you the program guide. Without that, you'll have to go through and manually figure out that Comedy Central is 69.3 and Fox 5 HD is 119.3 and BBC America is 104.6. It took me a night, and I made a spreadsheet... then they swapped some channels around, so it's not entirely accurate anymore.

That being said, it's worth a try. I don't even pay for my cable, it's part of my rent, so it's a big bonus to me.

Oh, and just to be extra nerdy: the only TRUE HD is what you pull in over an antenna. Everything else is compressed to some degree.

You can also get raw MPEG-2 over firewire from a digital HD cable box. If your box doesn't have firewire output, take it to the office and ask them to exchange it for one with firewire. There's an FCC mandate that they have to provide this, in the US. The only catch is that some channels (generally the premium ones) are encrypted.