How to Setup an Xbox One TV Tuner

Are you a cable-cutter, but still want to make the most out of your Xbox One to watch live TV in HD over a digital HDTV antenna?

Xbox One and Xbox One S comes with a really cool feature called OneGuide.  OneGuide basically allows your Xbox One to control your live TV.

In most cases, people have cable or satellite and they plug their DVR into their Xbox One via HDMI.  OneGuide allows you to seamlessly watch TV from your cable DVR but by using the Xbox One’s voice commands or game controller.

Note: In order to use a cable box with OneGuide, you need to have a Kinect with the Xbox One (for infrared blasting), or you need to have an Xbox One S (which comes with an IR blaster built in without the need for Kinect).

Now, what about all of us cable-cutters who no longer pay truck loads of money to cable or satellite companies?

Well, you can actually buy a pretty cheap USB TV Tuner for Xbox One that will let you use the OneGuide app to browse, watch, pause, and record live TV using just an HDTV antenna.

Buying an Xbox One TV Tuner

There is really only one contender in the market of selling Xbox One TV Tuner devices, and that’s Hauppauge.  They’ve been manufacturing TV tuners of all kinds for decades.

I bought this Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One and it works great.  I picked it up for just $60.In case you’re wondering if you can use a generic USB TV tuner meant for a PC and just plug it into the Xbox One, I tried that and it didn’t work.  The labelling on this is more than just marketing.  There are actually some physical specifications required in order to work with Xbox One.

Buying a Digital TV Antenna

Knowing which digital TV antenna to buy could be a critical decision.  If you’re on the outskirts of a city you could be out of range of TV reception for many channels if you don’t buy the right antenna.

That was the case with me.  I tried several antennas that performed very poorly for me.  Finally, I got a 50-mile rated HDTV antenna, the flat kind that sticks on your window.  It even came with a signal booster.

How to Setup Your Xbox One TV Tuner

1. Plug the antenna (and signal booster) into the Xbox One TV tuner’s coaxial connector.

   

2. Plug the Xbox One TV tuner into one of the Xbox One’s USB ports on the back (the tuner usually comes with a short USB extension cable so that you can plug that into a small space).
3.  A notification should pop up saying that the TV tuner was detected.  Hold the Xbox button on your controller while the notification is visible to go to the settings page to set it up.  If you missed it, just go into Settings > TV & OneGuide > TV tuner

   

4. Have the Xbox One scan through all the channels.  It should take a few minutes for it to scan through all of them.  Notice that it seems to make several passes since the channels that are found are not necessarily in numerical order.  So, if you’re looking for a certain channel and don’t see it, use your right joystick to scroll down the list.  If it didn’t seem to get everything it should, you can select “Try again”.

   

5. If you have duplicate channels showing for HD and SD versions of the same channel, you can fix it by going to Settings > TV & OneGuide > OneGuide, and selecting the option under USB to Hide SD duplicate channels.

   

6. At this point, you should be all done and ready to watch TV.  Go back to the home screen and open the OneGuide app, and you’ll be able to watch live TV and see a nice TV guide to see what’s on.

   

   Can you have a TV tuner and an HDMI input on Xbox One at the same time?

   Yes, you can!  If you followed this tutorial to setup live broadcast TV on the Xbox One, but you still want to plug your Kodi streaming box into the HDMI input on Xbox One, you can do both!

   Notice in the TV guide, that you can press Y to collapse the source that you’re in.  That allows you to switch between Antenna and HDMI source within the OneGuide app.

   

Feedback

I hope you found this tutorial helpful.  If you ran into any issues, please let me know in the comments below, and I would love to help (and to fix anything I may have missed in the setup instructions).

Thanks!