Why can't you watch one channel and record another channel at the same time on your DVR?

Answer 1

In brief, your DVR probably only has one station tuner built into it.

I don't believe that there is a tuner (electronic device) today that can tune into 2 channels at once. This feature was implemented with the advent of PIP (Picture-in-Picture) technology. But to have this feature, your television would need 2 tuners built into the television circuitry. With old analog cable, channels were pumped through the coax cable on different frequencies. If you put a splitter on the coax, you could get the full range of channels on both tuners. Nowadays with the advent of Set-Top Boxes (STB's) - usually a digital cable box, there is probably only one signal output (which can't be split). Some of the better cable boxes have a splitting feature built into them. If you have a television that supports PIP, chances are one of the inputs is an ATSC tuner which can receive OTA HD content, and the other is an NTSC tuner, that can only display standard definition content. A cheat to digital cable, is that the Cable company still pumps analog signals through their digital lines, and you could use the cable box on the first tuner input for HD content, and have the coax from the wall split, and the second connection going into the second tuner input, and get analog channels 2-99. But I didn't tell you that.