I agree that OSD alone doesn't warrant such a long video cable since the front panel provides the necessary information for setup.

Getting the pass-through may take a little work, I'm afraid. In my area, Time Warner Cable offers the Pace DC-550 as an alternative to the standard Scientific Altanta boxes (check out a copy of the manual here ), which has the necessary pass-through capabilities. The DC-550 appears to have been replaced by the DC-551 , which also has this ability. Scientific Atlanta doesn't seem to offer any boxes with this capability, and I don't think Motorola does either (I'm not sure whether cable in your area uses SA or Moto boxes).