The TV antenna is making a comeback

Post by car » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

dtparr wrote: post #206

car wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by scholia » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 12:36 AM UTC

njharman wrote: post #252

scholia wrote: post #213

One advantage of OTA TV is that it can be a very efficient use of spectrum. It costs the same to broadcast a TV signal to 5 million users as it does to broadcast it to 5 users. This is not the case with video (or radio) transmitted over the internet or via cellular networks, where every additional user consumes additional bandwidth.

The internet is not as simple as you imagine it to be.