So this past weekend I had digital cable installed at the house along with a Tivo. I fell in love with the Tivo the short time I was able to use it before the digital cable is installed. However, now that the digital cable is installed, I'm having some trouble connecting the Tivo to the digital cable box so that it can change channels. I had it working for a bit, but became frustrated with the setup and now I am thinking I just want to switch to regular analog cable.

The thing is the cable company says that I would need another box in order to keep receiving HBO with the analog cable. Would this extra box just be a "descrambling box" so that the premium channels are unscrambled? If so it seems that this setup would work much better than what I have currently with the digital cable.

What problems are you having? You are using an IR Blaster, correct?

Personally, that's why I'm still on analog, and don't have HBO or Showtime. I still want the channel-surfing flexibility I'd lose with the IR blaster on my standalone TiVO--assuming I get it working well...

did you redo guided setup?
what brand of cable box?
motorola, GI, General Instruments and (I think) Scientific Atlanta are all actually made by the same company and using the code lists for all 4 manufacturers will usually find one that works. If it's any of those try it's list first then the list called General Instruments, then the list called GI
at least that works on the Sony tivos

I can still channel surf. I split the cable line and put one into the cable box and then to TIVO (actually I have a Replay-TV - same principle though) and the other goes directly into my TV. Then I connect the TIVO to the TV using the A/V inputs. The only thing you can't do with this is channel-surf the higher channels on TV. However, even with the IR blaster set-up on mine, I can still change the channels relatively quickly on the Replay-TV. Just can't really go up and down quickly.

Well, I had the Tivo changing channels during my initial test, but when I went to clean up the cable and box placement I messed something up as I can't get the Tivo changing channels again (yeah, I'm using the IR blasters). The cable box is made by Pioneer and the Tivo is a standard Series 2 Tivo.

This little setup just isn't as seamless as it should be. I can see my wife being frustrated by this if the "channel changing" isn't as easy as possible.

I'm going to try and switch back to analog. I just wanted to make sure the Tivo could still change channels and record the premium channels (HBO) with the analog box that the cable company says I will need.

This might sound strange considering that I have neither a tivo nor digital cable but I do have a dish receiver that sends an IR signal to my vcr to tell it when to record a show. And while it worked fine for a few months, suddenly it started acting up. The problem was narrowed down to the vcr not receiving the IR signal from the receiver (note that the positions of both devices were EXACTLY the same - I have no idea why it suddenly became so sensitive).

To fix the problem, I have had to turn the receiver about 45 degrees to the left, so it's sitting on top of the vcr diagonally. Now it receives the signal fine. Weird. But maybe your problem is a similar one - when you cleaned up the wires/aligned the boxes/etc. the IR signal suddenly got blocked/couldn't bounce off of other things the same way, etc. and now you're having issues.

Try placing the boxes facing each other and see if they work that way (i.e. make sure the IR signal is getting through with no blockage). I'd also try unplugging both devices and letting them do a hard reset (leave unplugged for a few minutes before plugging in and turning them back on). Then try the face to face thing to see if the problem is the IR signal not getting through. If that's it, just experiment with placing the devices so that the signals get through all the time.

I'm having weird IR blaster issues myself - the channel changes don't seem to work all the time. In most cases I think its because the TIVO is sending numbers too quickly for the cable box to register. I've been fiddling with the placement of the IR thing but still having intermittent problems.

You probably should go to the TIVO community forum and ask for advice there if you are still having problems:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/

I know on my ReplayTv there is a menu setting to tweak how fast the digits are transmitted.

Mine used to drop digits all the time until I fixed it now it works 99% of the time (on weird occasions if teh cable is acting slow it might mess up.)

I found lots of help here.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/