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The TV antenna is making a comeback

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Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#201

Post by ars »

andyhnj wrote: post #189
dexterdog wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that last point. I live about 45 miles from Philly and 55 miles from NYC. I get pretty much all of the stations from both with minimal drop and I have a $35 antenna inside in my attic.

I'm curious about the antenna you're using. I'm also approximately equidistant from NYC and Philly, but I tried a digital antenna once, and could only pick up one NJ station, and none of the NYC or Philly ones. I'd love to find an antenna that works!

> I'd love to find an antenna that works!

Try the "coat hanger antenna" (google it). It's directional enough to be effective. There are some tweaks you can make to it to adjust how directional it is. (Adding more elements, or doubling it mainly.)

It's very cheap so you can experiment.

You'll need one of those impedance converter thingies to convert from twin lead to coax.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#202

Post by deckerdoes »

jccooper wrote: post #135
mariodiana wrote: post #113

The U.S. switch over to digital transmission killed my reception. The analog signal had no problem with the mountain ranges between me and the nearest metropolitan areas, but the digital signal can't make it through. I was using a rabbit ear antennae up until then. I get the NYC stations. It's perhaps a horrible thing to say, but Osama Bin Laden's boys knocked out only one of my channels and only temporarily; the FCC…

ATSC (well, 8-VSB) is pretty terrible at handling multipath. I live 12 miles from the antenna farm and ought to be able to get great reception with a bit of aluminium foil, but because I have a tree (who would have trees, right?) any one antenna position gets only about 2 channels well. If the FCC hadn't succumbed to NIH and used the European version (COFDM), which handles multipath better, people might actually see…

Odd, we have trees and are 30 miles LOS from downtown. We get Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, 3 PBS, the hmm forgot the name, CB? something. We get all we want which is main networks and in beautiful HD. I think Fox is in HD not sure, it looks nice though. If we spoke Spanish we'd have more choices. A few times a year in the early evenings Fox sometimes has issues but overall I'd pay for the quality we get if it wasn't free, not much maybe $10 most per month. Don't get any ideas US government!

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#203

Post by oh_sigh »

dexterdog wrote: post #104
ilamont wrote: post #89

I took a look at a relative’s cable bill last year. He lives in a town with three competing cable/ISP services. Here is how the monthly costs broke down: Expanded basic service: $60 High definition converter box: $10 Digital converter rental: $3 HBO Cinemax package: $18 Premiere Total Pack: $16 Showtime/TMC: $5 Starz: $5 Franchise fee: $7 Broadcast TV surcharge: $4 Sports programming surcharge: $2 Total monthly cost:…

I don't know about that last point. I live about 45 miles from Philly and 55 miles from NYC. I get pretty much all of the stations from both with minimal drop and I have a $35 antenna inside in my attic.

Toms River?

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#204

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

legitster wrote: post #159

I'm 24 and I have never had cable in my life. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not more common. You get a LOT of TV for free. I grew up watching PBS and Simpsons and etc. I remember at superbowl some of my friends were amazed that I was able to watch the football game without cable. I was floored. They didn't even know that channels came in over the air. I showed them the antenna, where it installs in the TV, how cheap th…

Makes you wonder what other good tech the group is ignoring.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#205

Post by kbenson »

kileywm wrote: post #97
kbenson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but I think there's a difference between the cable company "correctly filtering service" and a person getting additional hardware to bypass the cable modem demarcation. It does get muddied by them allowing customer cable modems, which means there's not a clear a demarcation point anymore.

There may be a terms of use clause forbidding splitting like this but it almost certainly isn't a demarcation issue, so there is no real 'bypass' that I am aware of. The demarcation is generally clearly marked (plastic box often called a 'network interface device') and is almost never located at the modem itself. Typically, the legal demarcation is on the exterior of houses. For a multiple dwelling unit (apartment co…

> The demarcation is generally clearly marked (plastic box often called a 'network interface device') and is almost never located at the modem itself.

Yes, but if cable companies always provided and required you use their cable modems, then there would be a clear demarcation point, the cable modem. Whether it's usually inside or outside is irrelevant (and "usually" in this case is debatable. I've worked at multiple business locations where it's inside, because there is a location dedicated for it). Of course there isn't a clear demarcation at the cable modem, as many cable companies allow you to use your own cable modem instead of theirs, which is why I said the issue is "muddied".

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#206

Post by dtparr »

car wrote: post #192
dtparr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I have a similar setup, but with the old standard PCI-based tuner that just pulls the data and dumps it. I hadn't seen a tuner option that would transcode it on the fly. Is there any noticeable lag when watching live? Does the WMC still record it in the standard wtv format, just with a different video codec? What's a rough size estimate for a 1-hr show? Can you adjust the amount of compression or otherwi…

Transcoding happens on the fly, in hardware I assume. The compression is configurable, from a very high quality 1080p profile, down to more lossy streams for mobile devices, 3 profiles total IIRC (non tweak able). The highest quality mode is _almost_ indistinguishable from the OTA signal. No lag or stutter, whatsoever. An added bonus of the transcode is the reduced bandwidth in the LAN. Previously I needed CAT5 for a…

Great info, thanks. That's a 4-6x size improvement from what I'm seeing now, so that'd be very helpful. Probably actually cheaper to buy this than just get a larger HDD.

I'd looked at options that would auto-transcode recordings on disk, but they generally changed enough things that it wouldn't maintain the metadata and/or otherwise treated them as individual videos and not episodic content.

One last question, do you happen to have any extenders? I'm using an xbox 360 as an extender and I wonder if it can play the h.264 encoded video.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#207

Post by aidenn0 »

carsonreinke wrote: post #178
twblalock wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Unless you want to watch a lot of sports.

Pretty much all of the MLB stuff (except for playoffs) is cable only. NFL will at least of the either Monday or Thursday game along with your local on Sunday.

For the cost of one to two months of Cable TV you can get all the regular season games online; since I'm a fan of an out-of-market team anyway, it's a no brainer for me.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#208

Post by JonathonW »

Symbiote wrote: post #138
narrowrail wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>would like to have a better antenna setup with DVR that does not require subscription I have been looking at a Channel Master[0] for this exact purpose; the cost is $250+HDD. It has an ethernet port which allows one to get an EPG [1] from Rovi, but it isn't required. If I pull the trigger maybe I'll do a write up and submit it. [0] http://www.channelmaster.com/Antenna_DVR_s/336.htm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Isn't an EPG part of the US-American standard? It has been part of the DVB (rest of the world…) standard since the beginning, so there's generally a button on a TV remote to display it. (The DVB MPEG transport stream contains mostly video packets, but is interspersed with the EPG — in bits — and other media. Almost all TVs will cache the EPG, though earlier systems required the user to wait until the requested inform…

EPGs are part of the standard and broadcasters are required to transmit them, but there's no quality control on them beyond what the broadcaster does themselves; some broadcasters do a great job and some... don't.

That's where paid services like SchedulesDirect [1] come in; they pull data from the same source that Tivo and the cable/satellite companies are using, which (usually) gives you accurate scheduling.

[1] http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#209

Post by Phlarp »

z2 wrote: post #139

Two years back I decided to make my own antenna. I had no idea what a folded dipole was, but found a website that instructed me to use a metal clothes hanger cut to the proper length for HD US signals, and a block of wood. I had neither so I taped some leftover enamel wire to a piece of cardboard. I still use this antenna today, and get about 50 channels, living 30 miles away from the nearest broadcast antenna. Point…

The requirements for a working antenna are actually pretty loose-- In most cases the TV will have two RCA jack inputs; one for cable and one for an antenna but the coax cable that goes from the wall to the TV will generally work just fine as an antenna if you plug it into the antenna jack and remove it from the wall so just the cord hangs off the back of your TV.

If you are in an optimal RF location (within a mile or two of the transmitter, no major obstructions, low noise floor, clear conditions etc) it should generally be possible to pick up OTA signals without any antenna at all.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#210

Post by lmm »

johnwards wrote: post #162
ForHackernews wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brits really have us beat here. For Americans, take a look at this list: http://www.ukfree.tv/channels/all On the other hand, they have to pay an annual government tax just for owning a TV.

The TV Licence funds the BBC content, which is Free to Air TV, online stuff, Radio etc. It has no ads and aims to have as much diverse stuff as possible. The BBC is awesome, I happily pay my tv tax :)

The BBC is awesome, but the TV License is incredibly regressive (it's basically a poll tax), and has failed at making them independent of parliament (instead of a parliamentary debate over how much money to give the BBC, we just get a parliamentary debate over how much the license fee should be). And their enforcers are... not nice, and an incredibly inefficient use of human labour. It would be better to fund the BBC from general taxation.
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