I’ve recently unhooked my Tivo… I picked up a Media Center Extender (the HP one) and that was the final step to moving all of our television watching to MCE 2005. We love it and we record tons of shows. Extender works wonderfully, better than the XBox extender because there is no stupid DVD to put in to watch TV and it is a lot quieter.

Everything looks great, except for the occasional thing on some of the lower channels (5 and 6). I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out what could be messing up the signal to those two channels on the cable feed in my office that is not messing up any others and doesn’t affect the feed in the living room… I’ve decided that my cable modem might be the problem, or at least part of the problem. The feed running into my office is split into 3 and hooked into my cable modem and into two Hauppauge 250 cards. The splitter is the right kind for this type of operation (I think), a 1Ghz 3-way splitter with the 4db output going to the cable modem and the two Hauppauge cards fed off of the 8db outputs. Everything seems to be working fine most of the time, but the occasional show looks horrible. It is only recently that we noticed that it was always West Wing and/or Alias (channels 5 and 6 respectively, around 9pm)…. and then when my wife added a season pass for Oprah (4pm, channel 5) it also experienced the same issue. All the time, lots of shows from the higher channels (30+) were recorded without any issue at all and a perfect picture.

Very puzzling…. any folks out there knowledgable about cable tv signals who have thoughts on my problem?