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)."

Comments

Only solutions...

[Lumpy]

1- violate your lease and get your antenna higher.
2- get cable tv.

sorry but you cant find a magical antenna that will pull in signals without getting it off the ground. you have to get an antenna into the air and away from obstructions. you can try to get a pair of high gain UHF bowtie array antennas from wineguard or channelmaster, but those will look very ugly and take up 4 feet by 3 feet in your sliding glass door.