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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)."
Try a masthead antenna amplifier. Get a good quality one and (hopefully) it will help compensate for the god-awful frontend in your TV tuner.
(Yes, I know masthead amps are really to compensate for long cable runs, but a low noise amp at the front upping things by 10-12dB is sometimes all it takes.)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
... is the WINEGARD SS-2000 16" Square Shooter HDTV Antenna. It looks a lot better, and comes with its own mounting equipment. Can also be mounted on existing satellite antennas.
Why does Radio Shack always seem to discontinue everything they have that ISN'T complete crap? I was looking for a omnidirectional mic the other day there only to find they had discontinued their best model.
It's like they're DETERMINED to suck.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.