cables

[jamiecid]

heres a question, if your signal comes from coax from the cable company or coax from the dish to your receiver. how does hdmi from the receiver to the tv make any difference?

 

[Hi Ho]

The problem is not the cable itself. Coaxial cable is perfectly capable of transferring the data required. The problem is that the RF output on equipment such as cable boxes and satellite receivers is modulated to channel 3 or 4 and it is not in any way HD or digital.

If cable and satellite receivers have ATSC or QAM modulators built in then any TV with an ATSC or QAM tuner could receive an HD signal from the box through coaxial cable.

I don't see that happening any time soon (if ever) since digital modulators are very expensive. The other issue is copy protection. The studios/networks like HDMI because it comes standard with HDCP. A modulated RF signal has not content protection and broadcasters do not like that.

 

[MDS]

Now if you don't use the RF output of the cable box (for the reasons Hi Ho described) but instead make the RF connection from the wall to the cable box/sat and then HDMI from the cable box/sat to the receiver:

It doesn't actually get 'better' but now you have digital data which can be manipulated in any number of ways (not the least of which is to add copy protection b.s. to it). Analog is the signal itself - hence analogous to the real world (our ears hear sound waves disturbing the air, not numbers). Digital is a representation of the signal which then has to be interpreted or 'decoded' if it is in a compressed format like MPEG2 that is used for cable and satellite.

As part of decoding you can scale it up or down, apply video processing algorithms to remove or reduce artifacts, process the audio from 2 channels to multi-channel, etc...and oh yeah - add copy protection to it.

 

[jamiecid]

cable

okay, if i got this right,even though coax brings the data into the receiver, the receiver {dish networks new hddvr} somehow "enhances" the signal "to be all it can be" and the only way to get that to my new samsung "hd67a750" is by using the hdmi port?

 

[jamiecid]

cable

p.s. i guess its academic, my new tv is being delivered tomorrow and i just lookes at specs again and it has no coax inputs anyway, only hdmi and those 3 rca plug thingys.

 

[MDS]

p.s. i guess its academic, my new tv is being delivered tomorrow and i just lookes at specs again and it has no coax inputs anyway, only hdmi and those 3 rca plug thingys.

The TV will have at least one RF input that will be labeled either 'antenna' or 'cable' (and oftentimes there is a menu option to select either one). If you use a cable box/sat receiver you don't need to use it because the cable box/sat will be doing all the work. There has to be a way to get audio/video (really video only if you use a receiver) from the cable box/sat back to the TV and that is where the HDMI cable (or component video) comes in.