Best Terrestrial/OTA HDTV Setup For an Apartment? 238
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)."
Re:Not enough gain? (Score:5, Informative)
Get satellite tv (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You may not be able.... (Score:5, Informative)
...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 [hdtvantennalabs.com] website: especially the HDTv Antenna Reviews [hdtvantennalabs.com].
No external antennas? Sue! (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Try a different antenna (Score:1, Informative)
Go to Amazon and look at the Terk antenna (it's a long pointy thing). There is another brand of antenna that looks this. I get different results from different antennas, so you have to experiment. You also didn't tell us how far you were from an OTA source? One other consideration is to use a QAM tuner; I have a cable modem for internet, I basically put in a splitter, run one end into the cable modem, and the other end into my HD Homerun device (a dual QAM/OTA HD tuner, which attaches to your ethernet based network!). I've also used an elgato EyeTV Hybrid, but I prefer the dual tuner :-P
I now get all my channels over clear QAM, and it works much better than over OTA (sometimes I have to rotate the antenna, which was annoying). btw, this is FREE
amplified antenna (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Get satellite tv (Score:5, Informative)
You only have the ability to do this when it comes to sticking a dish on your porch. You still don't have any rights to have the install guy go nailing a dish where ever it may be needed to get a signal.
If your porch faces north or if there's no place on the porch to get a signal due to buildings or plants, you are still out of luck.
The best thing he can do is just stick an antenna on the porch or in a window frame and hope for the best.
Speaking of outdoor antennas, go to some place like Best Buy with a no-hassle return policy. Get a cheap model, try it, if it doesn't work, take it back and keep upgrading until you've got something that works. It's a nice way of doing a bit of experimenting on their tab. More expensive doesn't mean better, as I get all the local HD channels with a pair of rabbit ears hooked up to my setup.
Nothing looks as cool as a $4200 panel with a $5 radio shack pair of rabbit ears stuck on top of it. :)
Re:No external antennas? Sue! (Score:4, Informative)
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 [fcc.gov].
Re:Only solutions... (Score:2, Informative)
Stay away from Best Buy (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Get satellite tv (Score:5, Informative)
In practice, under the amendment to our rules, renters will be able, subject to the terms of our Section 207 rules, to install Section 207 devices wherever they rent space outside of a building, such as balconies, balcony railings, patios, yards, gardens or any similar areas.
Re:Get satellite tv (Score:4, Informative)
47 C.F.R. Section 1.4000.
Read more about it here [fcc.gov]. The rule applies to "video antennas including direct-to-home satellite dishes that are less than one meter (39.37") in diameter (or of any size in Alaska), TV antennas, and wireless cable antennas."
There are some restrictions. For example you aren't guaranteed the right to mount your dish/antenna on a common area such as a roof or a wall. However, balconies and patios are fair game. As another poster else-thread mentioned, if your unit faces north, you're pretty SOL as far as dishes go.
QAM Cable (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Not enough gain? (Score:3, Informative)
Important note!...I don't know where the original poster is (or if they're even in the U.S.), but in many areas, as of the 2/2009 switch to all digital many DTV stations are moving from their current UHF frequencies to the VHF frequency where they now have their analog broadcast. In the New York area this is true for ABC, TheWB, and PBS, whose DTV broadcasts will be moved to 7, 11, and 13 respectively. I don't believe this is true for any VHF frequencies lower below channel 7.
...not that that stopped a slew of companies from screwing the public by marketing over-prices UHF-only antennas as "HDTV" antennas.
Winegard MS-2002 (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.dennysantennaservice.com/1073325.html
Re:Not enough gain? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been watching terrestrial ATSC with an indoor antenna and a MythTV box for several years now. I agree -- amplification is key. In my case, I don't have the luxury of power near my antenna, so I just installed an inexpensive (~$25) powered amp near my PC, and it had a very positive effect. You can pick one up almost anywhere...you can even try the A/V section at your local Target/WalMart.
Cabling to your antenna is also important if it's any distance from the PC. I recommend you keep it at least across the room from the PC, which can generate quite a bit of RF noise. Plus, the extra cable length will give you room to maneuver/aim your antenna. I suggest RG-59 (coax) as opposed to twisted pair. Again, you can get it cheaply at WalMart.
For an indoor antenna, I use a small outdoor UHF-only antenna I got at Radio Shack for ~$25. (It's basically just the small front piece from a full-size rooftop antenna -- a ~3' "spike" in the middle of a V-shaped reflector.) It takes up some space, but works a lot better than indoor antennas I've tried.
Lastly, it will take some amount of experimentation... AntennaWeb will give you a good idea where your local transmitters are, but indoor antennas are subject to lots of reflections and noise, so you might get better results by aiming the antenna a few degrees off of the "correct" orientation...left, right, or even vertically.
Re:Idea (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Great Antenna (Score:1, Informative)
A lot of the comments have suggested doing something other than what the poster want's to do.
I highly, highly, recommend building this antenna: http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/
It works unbelieveably well, though it's not compact or nice to look at. I guarantee you'll pull in stations.
Re:Get satellite tv (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I like your style, young man (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Works out of the box Mythbuntu HDTVpc (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This Works For Me (Score:1, Informative)
Beyond being dirt cheap that's a horrible antenna. The length of the dipole sets the frequency where the antenna is most sensitive. The instructions say 28 cm, which is ~1 GHz. That's too high a frequency, so antenna should be longer. Dipoles have a pretty narrow bandwidth. The distance between the reflector and the antenna is also frequency sensitive. Having it the wrong distance away can make things worse instead of better. Generally you'd want it 3/4 of a wavelength away from the antenna. There's no need for the reflector to be an entire plate. A single wire of the correct length at the right distance works just as well. You can also use wire as a directer. Also missing is antenna matching. There are cheap ways to make a balun that will greatly improve reception. Anyway, that's just the basics. There are plenty of great HAM websites that explain how to make a cheap yagi, which would work much better.
Re:Fine w/ Terk tv2 indoor antenna / ATSC tuner di (Score:1, Informative)
If you're using HDMI out to DVI in (or vice versa), it might be a problem with the color space(s). Computers use 0-255 for full black to full white, while video has "below black" and "above white", and uses only 16-235 for the "regular" signal.
Re:You may not be able.... (Score:2, Informative)
Pure plate glass, yes. Modern energy efficient glass, no. They reflect RF energy pretty well. And, wood and plaster absorb RF better than you might think. Simply taking his DB8 outside the walled in confines of his apartment might make a huge difference. But he's likely running into out ground level interference -- trees, other houses, hills, traffic, etc. Don't assume your best reception will be on a direct line to the transmitter. You may find reflections much stronger than a direct line. (I know I do.)