Channels & viewing

[FrustratedMan]

My Roku TV worked fine for years. A few weeks ago, I lost all my cable channels. The channels appear fine on all my other non-Roku tvs. 

After reading the discussion threads here and elsewhere, I've changed my coax cables, my cable box, rescanned channels, done a factory reset, and nothing works. The only "Live TV" that I get are Roku channels that are streamed. The cable channels however, have completely disappeared.

[renojim]

How is your cable box connected to your TV?  Typically, it would be connected via an HDMI cable and you'd switch to its input to access cable channels.

[FrustratedMan]

The cable box is connected with a coax cable to the Cable/Ant port in the back of my Roku TV. This is how I've had it connected since I bought the TV. The only other option with this cable box is via the 3 red-yellow-white RCA cable. There is no HDMI port in the cable box (this is a small box, not the big one with clock).

[renojim]

I see.  Did you have to tune to channel 3 or 4 on the TV to get to the cable box?

You might want to check with your cable company to see if you can get a new box with an HDMI output.  The quality would be much better.

[FrustratedMan]

No, I didn't have to tune into channels 3 or 4. Given that this was working fine before and having done troubleshooting on the cable side, I feel it's a Roku issue. 

[Strega2]

I’m not following this.  Are you saying you are not now and/or were never tuned to channel 3 or 4 in order to see your cable box?  Is that because your cable box outputs on a different channel?  (In theory, they could output on any channel, but 3 and 4 are the most common.)

Or something else?

And by the way, do note what @renojim  said about being able to get a vastly better picture over an HDMI connection.

[FrustratedMan]

On a Roku TV, I cannot “tune into” channels 3 or 4, as was possible with older TVs. To access those channels, I’d have to scan for them on the TV's "Live TV" settings. I’ve tried doing this, but they do not appear (they never have). Online forums say that may be due to the TV's inability to support analog signals, as many modern TVs have phased out support for these channels.

[Strega2]

How were you getting to the cable box previously?  Based on the connection you noted (antenna input), I would have expected that to be via tuning a channel.

Basically TVs can be set to:

Antenna/cable (that's the 75 ohm cable used by cable companies etc. On this input, you select the input and then a channel.)

A/V composite input (the RCA Red/White/Yellow)

A/V component input (similar to composite but 5 cables total)

HDMI (one cable with a sort of rectangular connection - pretty much what everything uses these days.)

Those are all the typical TV connections.

[FrustratedMan]

I was getting to the cable box via the first option. Maybe I'm being inarticulate when describing "tuning" a channel. With my Roku TV, you have to "discover" the channels via scanning. Channels 3 and 4 aren't found when scanning.

[Strega2]

Some possibilities that I can think of are:  Cable box is not on (or wasn’t on during channel scan), cable box is set to output on some other channel, cable box RF modulator has failed, TV tuner has failed, or, as mentioned, TV stopped supporting NTSC (which was dropped from broadcasting around 2009 - but would it get updated out of an existing TV?  Seems unlikely but I don't know.).

Some of this stuff is easiest to check via process of elimination.  Ie: mix and match cable boxes and TVs until you can pin it on one thing or the other.

Some ideas, besides checking the above, would be to use the composite out (red/yellow/white) instead of the RF cable/out.  This is a simpler/better connection with less to go wrong.  And consider asking the cable company for a more modern box with HDMI.  My parents have a Comcast box which is just a little bigger than a deck of playing cards.  It has cable in, and HDMI out.  Very simple.