tech question

[fox]

Anyone out there who can answer this sight-unseen?

On Saturday, I took my old non-functioning cable box (well, non-functioning; it brought the cable in, but it freaked out and quit working quite a lot, and sometimes even when it was working it haughtily informed me its recording side was unavailable) back to the office and got a new one. And the new one has a USB port in its front. Does this mean I can get stuff off my TV/DVR into my computer? Does it mean I can play things from my computer on the television? Does it, miraculously, mean both? (I see, now that I've found the thing via google, that there's a lot of documentation. So maybe in a few minutes I'll go hunting for the answer myself. :->)

Comments

[rubyrosered.livejournal.com]

My cable box has several connectors that look very inviting but are, essentially, inactive. My understanding is that it's not just the hardware, but the internal programming that governs whether you can use them or not and as far as I can tell Comcast does NOT want me to use them. I tried to hook my computer to a firewire port at one point and found some interesting suggestions online as to how to get around the Comcast blocks, but when it came to the part where I needed to edit the BIOs on my computer I just gave the whole thing up as a bad idea.

That said, technology is a wonderful thing and with luck you'll have a different experience. Many things are possible and google is a great tool for finding the fixes that aren't necessarily considered general practice. I wish you lots of luck!