Problems: Pioneer DVR-533H and TV Guide

[jarros]

Hello everyone. I just picked up a Pioneer DVR-533H a few days ago (great sale at FutureShop, $379 CAD), and I'm having some trouble with the TV Guide. With my cable service, I have channels 1-60 available through a regular tuner, while channels 61-130 are available through a digital cable box. The cable box is connected to the DVR as outlined on page 17 of the manual.

For some reason I can't get the TV Guide to recognize half the channels in the regular cable service. I run through the Initial setup, and then the TV Guide setup. In the TV guide setup, it asks me at the end if I have an antenna connected to the DVR. I say yes, and it does a scan from channels 1-68 (whereas the Initial setup runs from 1-125), and only ends up with half the chanels found. If I tell it that I don't have an antenna connected, it ignores the tuner all together and runs purely off the cable box. This works, but it's very slow and ties up my cable box. Also, in the Channel Editor it will not let me change the service from Cable Box to Air (or Cable, or anything).

Has anyone used a similar setup with their DVR? How did you get around this problem? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Jared

[DeepOne]

Antenna and analog cable are not the same thing. If you tell the DVR that you have an antenna connected, it will expect UHF frequencies for channels above 13 (or is it 14?). If you have cable connected to the RF input, then don't tell the DVR that you have an antenna.

If you don't want the DVR messing with your cable box, then tell the TV Guide setup that you have cable but no cable box. This way, you can record analog cable channels using the RF input, and you can record channels from the cable box using the line input. However, you will need to program both the cable box and the DVR when recording from the line input because the DVR will not be able to change channels on the cable box.

[jarros]

Makes sense. It's unfortunate that you can't select cable input instead of antenna, but I guess there's no way around it. Thanks for the response, now I know that I wasn't missing anything else!

Jared