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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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Or just get cable for a few months.
...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.
"hardware/GPU acceleration on Linux is very, very limited"
:)
As opposed to being a system requirement for the command line on Vista?
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
... 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.
The best movies are not playing on TV in general anyway.
Get fast internet and have a selection of streaming movies and tv shows from the internet.
HD is only all that great for movies that can actually use all that extra detail such as documentaries and such. I wouldn't focus on HD as much compared to selection for overall entertainment value.
Sounds like your best option is to bribe the landlord to get something better setup. For most people that's cable or FIOS but I guess you can't get them ??
A media library of movies and TV shows might be your most practical method. Hard drive capacity has gotten so huge and cheap it's not hard to have an endless supply of new content ready to go and easily searchable.
A netflix account might help, but in general you want to target the viewing audience, that is get stuff people in the house tend to like.
TV is only so rewarding for anything beyond lots of stream of mediocre programming. That's why god made movie channels and DVD's :P
I made a modified version of this with some wire, cardboard, and tin foil. Works great. I have a house and this is used on the first floor, mounted right beside a window:
http://members.shaw.ca/hdtvantenna/
I am in the process of making this, but the first one works so well, I've kind of put it off...(at least until after the Olympics):
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/762088/coat_hanger_hdtv_antenna_better_than_store_bought_amazing/
The key is that they are directional, to be fair, I do have to turn it around a lot for certain stations, but where I'm at they are all more or less due south.
what does Vista crappy command line interface have to do about TV. It is really about the right tool for the right job. And sometimes GASP! Linux isn't the right tool for the job. It is not that it can't do the job adequately (TiVo has proven that (However TiVo took advantages of Linux's strength to be a good appliance OS (Yes I have programmed in LISP))) but it is not really the right tool for the job, Espectailly if you just want to get it up quickly and running right, with little effort. Normally if you get new hardware they tend to have drivers for Windows, Linux is hit or miss. While I am a Mac Fan myself it isn't always the best solution for these type of things as there is chance the OS will not support it like Linux and the fact that you kinda need to choose from Apple brand hardware which has gaps in its offering making it difficult to get the right computer for your needs. For this case Vista is probably the best choice.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Or, get an unlimited borrowing plan and take out a bunch of movies at a time.
Build the Gray-Hoverman antenna which we discussed recently. It's a grid plane with a few bent wires in front.
A combination of Netflix , Basic cable and Hulu keep me very happy. Hulu(.com) has some of my favorite shows within a day of going out on air (Daily show etc.), netflix has instant streaming of old movies, and latest movies by DVD, basic cable has all the major networks. Cable modem Internet + basic Cable analogue channels should be $30 a month if you stand your ground with the cable company - they desperatly want to give you basic cable if you sign up with internet in my area.
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?
Gah, ignore that. I just realised what you meant and you're right, it isn't a rebuttal.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
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.
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
Telling the truth != bashing. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's bashing. He has a point.
I haven't been able to get a completely straight answer to this, but... I believe the following three facts to be true:
a) Most "HDTV" antennas sold today are UHF-only.
b) All digital TV being broadcast today is being broadcast on UHF.
c) Come February 2009, when analog stations stop broadcasting on VHF, SOME stations that are currently broadcasting a digital signal in the UHF band will CHANGE THEIR FREQUENCY ALLOCATION TO VHF.
According to AntennaWeb, one example of this is WHDH-TV, "Channel 7", the Boston NBC affiliate and a major, popular station.
So, if I'm correct, some people who think they're up and running and all ready for February will be very surprised to see some DIGITAL stations they're CURRENTLY receiving go black in 2009, when the station shifts to a frequency their antenna isn't built for.
if I'm correct, this is going to be a major headache for the few who have bothered to prepare for digital, and one for which there is no publicity at all.
The reason I keep saying if I'm correct is that the salesman at You-Do-It, a great Boston-area electronics store that has a huge selection of antennas and antenna-related paraphernalia says I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. I hope he's right and I'm wrong.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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