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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)."
The low noise benefits of mast mounted pre-amplifiers are good. Remember that most ota hd channels are in the UHF range so get an amp with gain in that band. Also: Try www.tvfool.com for aiming. Lots more information available to use.
If you're in the US, you can tell the land lord to piss off, they can not stop you from getting a satellite dish. I had a similar problem with my HOA, and Fed law trumps HOAs and landlords.
...to mount an external antenna, but you may be able to mount one inside a window. The glass should be more radio-transparent than the walls.
I strongly recommend the HDTv Antenna Labs website: especially the HDTv Antenna Reviews.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
The FCC allows for mounting of external attennas, and your apartment complex is acting against the law by not allowing them. On the other hand, even mounting outside on the first floor won't help much.
Go to Amazon and look at the Terk antenna (it's a long pointy thing). There is another brand of antenna that looks this. I get different results from different antennas, so you have to experiment. You also didn't tell us how far you were from an OTA source? One other consideration is to use a QAM tuner; I have a cable modem for internet, I basically put in a splitter, run one end into the cable modem, and the other end into my HD Homerun device (a dual QAM/OTA HD tuner, which attaches to your ethernet based network!). I've also used an elgato EyeTV Hybrid, but I prefer the dual tuner :-P
I now get all my channels over clear QAM, and it works much better than over OTA (sometimes I have to rotate the antenna, which was annoying). btw, this is FREE
If you can find one, try to get an antenna with part number 15-1880 from Radio Shack. They've been discontinued, but your local store might still have one in stock or you might be able to find one on ebay. It's a simple indoor amplified UHF antenna and passive VHF antenna. I used it in an apartment surrounded by trees about 45 miles away from the towers and was able to get all the HD channels except CBS. CBS used VHF, that's why I couldn't get it. People on AVS forum rave about the antenna, and they were right.
Yeah, just cough up for some basic cable service for a few months. Most of the traditional cable companies don't do contracts so signing up for a couple months and then ditching them won't result in termination fees.
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Nearly all of the B&M electronics retailers sell absolutely horribly shitty antennas. (There are occasionally decent ones but it's RARE.)
If you want to get a good antenna you need to go to a specialty store (likely online) or in many cases you'll have luck at home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowes.
Look for products from Channel Master or Winegard. Both make good antennas and preamps. There are a few other good brands but those are the two that come to mind first.
If you fail with CM or Winegard - get cable. Unfortunately reliable terrestrial HD can be difficult. I don't even bother in my apartment. Everything else about your setup is fine, your OS makes no difference if reception is bad. Garbage in, garbage out.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Most cable companies offer a dirt-cheap package containing only local broadcast channels. These channels are required by law to be sent unencrypted. I pay Comcast $8/month and get all the major broadcast networks in HD, plus a few random cable channels like History and BET. Even better: Comcast gives me a $10 discount on ANY TV/internet package, so I actually save $2/month by getting the limited TV package.
Any TV tuner card that accepts "Clear QAM" will be able to tune unencrypted cable signals.
Important note!...I don't know where the original poster is (or if they're even in the U.S.), but in many areas, as of the 2/2009 switch to all digital many DTV stations are moving from their current UHF frequencies to the VHF frequency where they now have their analog broadcast. In the New York area this is true for ABC, TheWB, and PBS, whose DTV broadcasts will be moved to 7, 11, and 13 respectively. I don't believe this is true for any VHF frequencies lower below channel 7.
...not that that stopped a slew of companies from screwing the public by marketing over-prices UHF-only antennas as "HDTV" antennas.
This is an amazing omnidirectional antenna that is small enough to fit in many closets if needed. The 2000 is the same antenna but with 50' of coax, which you would not need if you installed it inside.
http://www.dennysantennaservice.com/1073325.html
I've been watching terrestrial ATSC with an indoor antenna and a MythTV box for several years now. I agree -- amplification is key. In my case, I don't have the luxury of power near my antenna, so I just installed an inexpensive (~$25) powered amp near my PC, and it had a very positive effect. You can pick one up almost anywhere...you can even try the A/V section at your local Target/WalMart.
Cabling to your antenna is also important if it's any distance from the PC. I recommend you keep it at least across the room from the PC, which can generate quite a bit of RF noise. Plus, the extra cable length will give you room to maneuver/aim your antenna. I suggest RG-59 (coax) as opposed to twisted pair. Again, you can get it cheaply at WalMart.
For an indoor antenna, I use a small outdoor UHF-only antenna I got at Radio Shack for ~$25. (It's basically just the small front piece from a full-size rooftop antenna -- a ~3' "spike" in the middle of a V-shaped reflector.) It takes up some space, but works a lot better than indoor antennas I've tried.
Lastly, it will take some amount of experimentation... AntennaWeb will give you a good idea where your local transmitters are, but indoor antennas are subject to lots of reflections and noise, so you might get better results by aiming the antenna a few degrees off of the "correct" orientation...left, right, or even vertically.
Are you sure you don't need MONSTER CABLES?
Joking aside, Lumpy is right. The connection between the antenna and the tuner is not a "wire", it is a "transmission line" -- an impedance controlled duct for RF energy. That's not BS, that's physics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line
The quality of transmission line used has a huge impact on received signal strength and signal:noise ratio if the cable run is long. RG6 quad-shield is sort of the standard for high-quality TV coax. RG59 is the other commonly available option, and is not really suitable for long antenna feedlines because of the high loss and poor shielding.
Now Monster does produce some coax products, and apparently the real physics and engineering of RF transmission lines isn't "cool" enough for their marketing department, so they decided to spout a bunch of random buzzwords instead to ensure that they avoid any hint of legitimacy in their advertising.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
A lot of the comments have suggested doing something other than what the poster want's to do.
I highly, highly, recommend building this antenna: http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/
It works unbelieveably well, though it's not compact or nice to look at. I guarantee you'll pull in stations.
Linux Hardware Accell:
XvMC - Linux equivalent of DxVA, MPEG2 offload to GPU. Works for some, but is troublesome for many. Setup, smooth output, and reliability are questions. Supported by NVidia. Intel has always had minimal support (MC offload) but recently has been working on a full XvMC implementation (which I haven't used yet, so can't comment on the quality).
VAAPI - Intel led project to produce a better video acceleration API. Addresses MPEG4/H.264 as well as MPEG2, and allows for more flexibility in offloading more to the GPU. Has been in progress for 1 year+. No apps that I know of have implemented VAAPI support (the Myth developers seemed fairly hostile to the concept). Intel integrated GPUs can/do support this.
GLSL / GPU computing offload - There is a lot of talk about using GLSL or similar model for offloading the video decoding compute load to the GPU. But, as far as I know, there are no open source implementations. This could allow very broad/flexible implementations, requiring only OpenGL 2.0. Older GPUs, and many embedded GPUs, would not be able to support this.
Other options?
- MyHD ATSC/QAM receiver with hardware decoder. A project to write a driver was started, but never reached a usable level.
- MPEG2/4/H.264 offload cards. Some exist and have Linux drivers, but either the driver or the actual card is hard to get as an end user.
There is always software decoding. Recent CPUs can easily handle MPEG2 HD decoding. But, it still takes a large percentage of system resources, and can be subject to poor playback from other things running on the system.
You can do this pretty cheap if you need to. Here is my setup. ATX computer case and power supply - I have a spendy lian li but that only gets you style points and little functionality gain over any other case. Gforce 7600gs - This is a relatively cheap card that will be able to decode 1080p hd content if you need it to. AMD X2 3800+ - Two cores is nice here so that you can run more than one cpu intensive process without getting choppiness while watching TV. I have 4GB of memory in the machine. I would recommend at least 2GB because optimally you want any HD content to be well buffered into memory. Swapping to disk will destroy your experience. A motherboard that does what you need it to do. You can get the cheapest motherboard possible and it should meet your needs. AV-710 sound card. This card will cost around 20 US dollars and it sounds just as good as an expensive creative card. It has 7.1 analog jacks and an SPDIF Optical out (if you have a receiver). HD-5500 HD tuner card - works out of the box. The only negative to this card is that the IR receiver that comes with it is somewhat of a hack to get working. I have it working if anyone has questions about that. 80GB hard drive or larger to allow for those really large HD tv feeds. A 1hr program takes up about 7GB space. mice, keyboards, displays are all things that don't really matter in the scheme of things. Mythbuntu linux works out of the box for me. I consider myself a Unix expert but I would trust my father to be able to install Mythbuntu, and all he knows how to do on a computer is turn it on and get to Solitaire. :-)
Finally HE/C ACC TERK | HDTVS HDTV ANTENNA is the antenna I use.
Parts list:
HE/C ACC TERK | HDTVS HDTV ANTENNA $89.99
DVD_BURN NEC|7170A-01 $31.99
SND CARD CHAINTECH|CT-AV710 7.1 $21.99
Gigabyte 7600GS $85.07
CPU AMD|A64 X2 3800+ 65W AM2 $66.75
ABIT AN52 NFORCE520 AM2 $69.99
MEM 1Gx4|CORSAIR $129.98
PSU KINGWIN|ABT-350MM 350W $23.99
80GB Sata 2 hard drive ~$45
Mythbuntu http://mythbuntu.org/ $(cost of internet service+time involved with downloading it)
These prices are pretty old. I'd guess that the same computer today could be put together for a few hundred less.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Beyond being dirt cheap that's a horrible antenna. The length of the dipole sets the frequency where the antenna is most sensitive. The instructions say 28 cm, which is ~1 GHz. That's too high a frequency, so antenna should be longer. Dipoles have a pretty narrow bandwidth. The distance between the reflector and the antenna is also frequency sensitive. Having it the wrong distance away can make things worse instead of better. Generally you'd want it 3/4 of a wavelength away from the antenna. There's no need for the reflector to be an entire plate. A single wire of the correct length at the right distance works just as well. You can also use wire as a directer. Also missing is antenna matching. There are cheap ways to make a balun that will greatly improve reception. Anyway, that's just the basics. There are plenty of great HAM websites that explain how to make a cheap yagi, which would work much better.
Since ATSC is digital and heavily compressed, reception problems will generally not menifest in some subte discoloration, but instead at least 8x8 pixel blocks of completely wrong colors or parts of an image being drawn at the wrong place. If your color is persistently off by just a little, it's more likely a connection or A/D or D/A conversion problem.
If you're using HDMI out to DVI in (or vice versa), it might be a problem with the color space(s). Computers use 0-255 for full black to full white, while video has "below black" and "above white", and uses only 16-235 for the "regular" signal.