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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.
...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.
"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
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.
The FCC can not tell a property owner he or she must allow an antenna
I don't think that's true. This seems pretty clear.
That will not work. you MUST use RG6 or better (I suggest RG6 Quad Flooded for best HDTV antenna installs.)
running a thin copper wire will simply make him get crappy reception. you have to run the right stuff for the right job. and that's RG6...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
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
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.