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Best Terrestrial/OTA HDTV Setup For an Apartment?
thesandbender writes "I don't watch TV but keep an HTPC for watching movies. One of my relatives is very ill and I'll have a lot of family rotating through my apartment and I'd like to have a few more options for entertainment. I'm running Vista MCE and bought a Hauppauge HVR-1800 with a DB8 HDTV antenna and I've used AntennaWeb to point the DB8 in the best direction. The results have been terrible and I'm looking for recommendations / suggestions for hardware and setup. I am on the first floor of a three-story apartment building and I can't mount any external antennas (I know this is a major issue). Thankfully almost all the transmitters are located in the same place so a good, compact directional antenna might be effective. And please... no platform bashing. They all have their issues (I have a lot of h.264 encoded files... hardware/GPU acceleration on Linux is very, very limited at the moment)."
Why on earth would somebody who doesn't watch TV move house just to entertain relatives visiting during a family member's illness? Not to mention - At least where I've lived, apartment complexes that bar external antennas are much more common than those that allow them (at least when you're talking about complexes with at least a few floors). So moving house may imply quite a premium. Of course, slipping a few bucks to the landlord may garner some leeway.
For a short-term, easy-to-implement solution, I've got to side with the posters suggesting cable. Subscribe while there's traffic coming through and then dump it. Why spend the time, trouble, and $$ rejiggering a fancy antenna system to entertain if it's not a long-term solution. Cable's easy and may even be cheaper than investing in fancy hardware if you don't need it permanently.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.