On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 08:09:47PM -0500, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
Hi folks, before simply saying you avoid television, Part of what I do professionally means accessing a great deal, news channels and other things for example. And for me, the, I will just watch it on my computer is a nailed shut door. This entire property is Bell fibe saturated which while it might translate to one of their fibe TV boxes working for me, its almost December and I am no closer to my land line solution..even with photographs of the existing jacks. So,I am wondering if at all, it is still possible from anyone to simply find old fashioned cable box cable. I have all the rest of the equipment, and it all works..even my VCR. I am even wondering if, since the place is so saturated for wireless, if I got an older apple TV, third gen still had optical connectors, or a rocku, I could come up with something. not as good as regular cable, but I am grasping for ideas. thoughts?
Bell's Fibe service has only ever worked with their boxes. Rogers cable has been moving to all digital over the last quite a few years, and analog cable (that a VCR could directly tune) has been gone for a while, with everything going digital. They even gave people free little boxes for a while to connect to older TVs that could tune the basic digital channels but I don't think they even do that anymore. I think everything now involves a digital cable box. On top of that they have been moving to IP based systems (Rogers Ignite) for a number of years and I doubt they would install the legacy digital cable anymore for new accounts. Definitely no analog cable left anymore. Of course you can in theory receive over the air channels using an attenna and an ATSC tuner, but if you are in a basement that seems unlikely to work. So unfortunately as far as I can see, the only things you can get these days is Bell Fibe or Rogers Ignite, both of which require using a box from the respective company and only outputs HDMI. VCRs won't do anything with that, and older TVs won't either. The streaming method might work, although if you were looking to get access to local TV stations, I have no idea if any of the streaming services offer that. As far as I can find, some of the Bell Fibe boxes have optical audio out. The Rogers Ignite boxes do not appear to have it. Of course some TVs also have optical audio out, so it might not have to be optical out on the box you are receiving with, if the TV has that. -- Len Sorensen