Originally posted by
McNutty
Unfortunately, if you already have a Tivo, it's unlikely to be cablecard-capable unless you splurged and got a deluxe model with features you didn't necessarily need at the time. So you're stuck with a cable box. That can be made to work with the Tivo, but it's sort of a nasty hack: you configure your Tivo so that it knows there's a cable box, and when it wants to record something on channel 123, it actually makes a few little bursts of infrared light that makes the cable box think someone actually punched "123<enter>" on the remote control. There are problems with this approach (like it's possible for the lighting situation to interfere and make it miss button presses, so instead of recording channel 123 it records channel 13), but I think it's pretty common for it to work just fine. What you need to make this work is an "IR Blaster." There was probably one in the box with your Tivo, but they're pretty cheap if you lost it. It's basically an LED on a wire that plugs into a jack on the back of your Tivo, and you position the LED somewhere just in front of the IR receiver on the cable box.