On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Ronn! Blankenship < [email protected]> wrote:
> > (2) Will a computer with a TV tuner card pick up the digital signal > (without further modification), or would it either require a > converter box in the line or have to be connected to cable? And does > anyone have any recommendations for such cards, particularly (if it > makes a difference) ones which will turn an existing PC into a > DTV-ready TV set? Cable is supposed to continue offering analog signals, as I understand it, so the old cards (and TVs) will work with it. I have several DTV receivers for PCs. I have one from ADS Tech (Instant TV HD), which died a yaer or so after I bought it. So I won't recommend that. I also have a Pinnacle USB gizmo (PCTV 800e), which seems to work okay. I imagined I would use it with my laptop, but now I know that most laptops don't have the graphics power to do HDTV very well. So I have the Pinnacle USB gizmo plugged into our living room media computer. When it works it is fine, but sometimes the drivers seem to crash when it starts recording. Luckily, though, I also have a DTV receiver card in that computer (so that in theory, it can record two shows at once and it sometimes actually does). The card is an AverMedia M780. I'm using SnapStream Beyond TV for schedule info, recording, etc. It came with one of the cards. All of these were the cheapest stuff I could find. I think I got the dead one at CompUSA when they were going out of business. It worked for a while. We don't watch much TV... well, actually, lately, we've fallen back into the habit somewhat, but we mostly record movies and how-to shows. We rarely watch anything live. No cable, just an antenna. Speaking of antennas, if you go that route, you may want to replace any splitters you have in your cable. I had really lousy signal strength until I replaced a splitter, after noticing in the store that new splitters are rated up to higher frequencies. Or maybe it was just that the splitter was old. Who knows, but after I replaced it, we had far more channels and stronger signals, which in DTV means less jerks. Except the ones who host Fox news talk shows, of course. We get 40 or 50 channels here in the South Bay. A lot of them are redundant most of the time and many are in languages I don't understand (tempted to refer to Fox news again), but there's a lot to choose from even without cable. Alas, we are going to get cable again soon, I guess. I'm moving everything off my home server to a hosted solution and dumping DSL and our home phone line in favor of cable, which should be cheaper, faster and maybe, just maybe more reliable (we have a noisy phone line). Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
