Configuring Clear QAM on the Hauppauge 2250

For a TV tuner, both Ian and I have the Hauppauge 2250. It's a dual tv tuner that can pick up two HD channels over the air simultaneously. I bought an antenna (two, actually) in order to cancel all of my cable services; it turns out the bill is actually cheaper when you have basic cable added anyway. In this case, there are some options, to recover broadcast HD from your cable provider. The benefit here is that you don't need to spend money on an antenna, you don't have to worry about the positioning of the antenna, and your cable bill will likely be lowered in the end as a result.

I followed the directions here at this website, which were really helpful in figuring everything out (thanks to Ian for pointing me to this):

To configure this in Windows Media Center:
1) download the Clear QAM beta plugin for WMC here:
2) go to the "Set up TV signal" menu under the settings submenu, under the tasks menu.
3) Update your TV setup options, then say "No" to the automatic signal setup.
4) Pick "antenna" as your tv signal.
5) Pick ATSC as your signal type.
6) Just go through the rest of the menu, pay no attention to the lack of signal strength indications.

After this, go to your WMC guide, go to the "Online Media" menu and select the Clear QAM plugin from the program library. Complete the scan, it may take awhile.

Note! If you have trouble with a "case13" error here, just click with your remote instead of your wireless keyboard/mouse. I went to a lot of extra trouble in order to avoid these errors when I didn't need to.

After you reboot, go back to the signal strength area and see what you get. Write down the channels which you don't get, and head to the guide setup in order to remove them. Now you're getting HD over your cable and you can return your antenna!

First Impressions of the Cable Alternative

The first night worked out pretty good overall.  We took to the guide and set up series recordings for our favorite Thursday night shows (30 Rock, The Office, Hell's Kitchen) and my wife wanted to record Grey's Anatomy (which I am not watching).  Since we have a dual tv-tuner, we could record two shows at once, in high-definition.  

We still had a conflict for an hour of prime time TV during the 30 Rock / Office hour, so we opted to not record those two shows and watch them later on Hulu.  Hulu is an awesome service.  I'm on the Boxee windows alpha list right now, awaiting a build, so in the meantime I have to actually bring up a browser and go to http://www.hulu.com.

Hulu has been great for two reasons so far.  First, my wife can find full length shows (supported by advertising) to put on as noise, where before, she would have picked some random cable channel.  I think there is enough content there to keep her satisfied on that front.  Secondly, I started watching the Daily show regularly over the last week, where I had basically stopped watching it over the last year.  

As a side note, if you are thinking there are some channels that you can't live without (CNBC being an example), shows like "Mad Money" have full length, advertising free video podcasts posted.  As another example, we had HBO and all the shows we were watching had ended the new episode runs, except for Bill Maher's show.  I found out he also has a podcast with full length audio only episodes, which suits me just fine.

Pulling up the video podcast section of iTunes, I can wander through the "News & Politics" section and find full length episodes of "Meet the Press", MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow" show and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann". 

My Current Setup (3/18/2009)

I did it, this morning I called up my cable provider and told them I was no longer interested.

So, I figured now would be a good time to give a run down of my current setup.  I will go in much more detail about each individual component in future posts, today I am give a short example of how they helped me quit cable.  

Home Built PC running Vista Home Premium - This is a year old desktop that I haven't been using much.  I built it for gaming, so it has some horsepower, all I needed to add was a HDTV tuner card so I can record TV.  I am currently using a mix between Windows Media Center and Boxee to get the content I am interested in.

XBOX 360 - Prior to hooking this machine up, I was using my 360 to stream content from my MacBook (using a wonderful program called Connect360).  I will continue using this machine for streaming movies off of Netflix, though Boxee does offer the ability, I am a fan of the XBOX interface (for now).

That is pretty much it for TV content devices, I have them hooked up to my 50" Toshiba DLP HDTV and life is good.