anyone recommend a good OTA HD tuner/receiver/antenna?

On Feb 23, 7:46*am, "Elmo P. Shagnasty"
wrote:
*Wes Newell wrote:
They're just standard put together PC's
connected to TV's. There's nothing really special or unique about any of
it.
Maybe you have pictures from the hundreds of hours you've spent making
it all work--and continue to spend on a weekly basis.

My HDTV system is a $220 used Dell and a $50 USB tuner connected to an
old UHF antenna rebuilt for lower frequencies. I should have picked a
CPU faster than 2.2G and the Hauppage programs are crude but it does
work and will record an hour of HDTV onto a DVD.

The only significant HDTV-related software issue was finding and
shutting down all unnecessary processes, especially the the antivirus
software.

I am an electronic technician and need to understand Windows
administration for my job, otherwise I would have gone further with
MythTV. I did use Knoppix to help clean out the previous owner's
malware infections.

Jim Wilkins

"Wes Newell" wrote in message
news:_S1vj.7448$0%[email protected]
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:18:07 -0800, khee mao wrote:

I have 4 of my HD tuners in a PC running MythTV. It's not that expensive
to do and you can record as many shows as you like in HD. Total cost for a
4 tuner system with 500GB drive space shouldn't exceed about $350 if you
shop around. I paid less than $25 each for the HD tuners.

A single external HD receiver will cost you about $100 for a cheap one.
Probably $150-$200 for a good one. Once you set up a multituner DVR you
won't know how you lived without it. Tivo sucks by comparison for ATSC.
See links below.


Myth looks pretty awesome, but can I run it on a PC that isn't cabled to the
TV I'd want to watch the programming on?

Wes Newell wrote:

I have 4 of my HD tuners in a PC running MythTV. It's not that expensive
to do and you can record as many shows as you like in HD. Total cost for a
4 tuner system with 500GB drive space shouldn't exceed about $350 if you
shop around. I paid less than $25 each for the HD tuners.

Wes.... what are the specs on that TV "server" you use?
is it a low powered CPU that consumes little
electricity since it is on 24/7? A cheaper CPU maybe?

and...does leaving it on 24/7 significantly impact your
electric bill?

Jim Wilkins wrote:

My HDTV system is a $220 used Dell and a $50 USB tuner connected to an
old UHF antenna rebuilt for lower frequencies. I should have picked a
CPU faster than 2.2G and the Hauppage programs are crude but it does
work and will record an hour of HDTV onto a DVD.

Is the above system hooked up to a standard TV for
viewing? Or is the PC monitor your "TV screen"?

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 07:46:17 -0500, Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article [email protected],
Wes Newell wrote:

Any pictures of everything one can look at?

No, I don't have any pictures. They're just standard put together PC's
connected to TV's. There's nothing really special or unique about any
of it.

Maybe you have pictures from the hundreds of hours you've spent making
it all work--and continue to spend on a weekly basis.

It usually takes me less than 1 hour to assemble a computer even with my
old age and bad eyes. It takes about another 30 minutes to install the
software to operational condition. It's hard to say what it would take
someone of lessor knowledge to do it. Or how much time they would want to
play with the default settings. Many people just get it working and then
don't mess with it. Granted that there are lots of options that need to be
configured if you want to use those options, but for standard DVR use it's
not an issue. And your dumb ass remark about the hours I spend on it
weekly to keep it working, is just that, a dumb ass remark.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
My Tivo Experience http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/tivo.htm
Tivo HD/S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm
AMD cpu help http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:18:34 -0600, me wrote:

Jim Wilkins wrote:

My HDTV system is a $220 used Dell and a $50 USB tuner connected to an
old UHF antenna rebuilt for lower frequencies. I should have picked a
CPU faster than 2.2G and the Hauppage programs are crude but it does
work and will record an hour of HDTV onto a DVD.

Is the above system hooked up to a standard TV for viewing? Or is the PC
monitor your "TV screen"?

You can use anything that will give you a display. The one I'm on now is a
19" monitor at 1280x1024. I did have another on another 19" monitor at
1600x1200, but replaced it with a 27" HDTV. I've used both DVI and VGA
connections to the HDTV. My wifes TV was an old 32" analog TV connected
via S-Video. She used it that way for about 2 years. I've recently
replaced that with a 37" HDTV that works equally well via VGA or DVI. So
anything you can hook up to the PC will work. It doesn't need any tuners,
since you won't use them anyway. It's usually just cheaper buying an HDTV
than a huge monitor. Just make sure your PC has a matching video output to
the TV/monitor and you'll be ok.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
My Tivo Experience http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/tivo.htm
Tivo HD/S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm
AMD cpu help http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php

On Feb 23, 4:18*pm, wrote:
Jim Wilkins wrote:
My HDTV system is a $220 used Dell and a $50 USB tuner connected to an
old UHF antenna rebuilt for lower frequencies. I should have picked a
CPU faster than 2.2G and the Hauppage programs are crude but it does
work and will record an hour of HDTV onto a DVD.

Is the above system hooked up to a standard TV for
viewing? Or is the PC monitor your "TV screen"?

That particular PC is maxed out driving its 15" Dell monitor from the
built-in video adapter. It has a Radeon card and 19" monitor for
flight sims selectable by Hardware Profile at bootup but it can't
quite run them and keep up with the tuner, although it can play back a
recording on the 19". It's quite adequate for one viewer at arm's
length but that's all.

My analog TV is a 32" Sanyo which has a very nice, sharp picture with
the currently broadcast NTSC signal. If I stand where both appear the
same size, the Sanyo has better colors and looks almost as good.

Jim Wilkins

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:12:24 -0800, khee mao wrote:

"Wes Newell" wrote in message
news:_S1vj.7448$0%[email protected]
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:18:07 -0800, khee mao wrote:

I have 4 of my HD tuners in a PC running MythTV. It's not that
expensive to do and you can record as many shows as you like in HD.
Total cost for a 4 tuner system with 500GB drive space shouldn't exceed
about $350 if you shop around. I paid less than $25 each for the HD
tuners.

A single external HD receiver will cost you about $100 for a cheap one.
Probably $150-$200 for a good one. Once you set up a multituner DVR you
won't know how you lived without it. Tivo sucks by comparison for ATSC.
See links below.


Myth looks pretty awesome, but can I run it on a PC that isn't cabled to
the TV I'd want to watch the programming on?

I'm not certain I understand your question. Each TV/monitor in the system
has to be connected to a PC. MythTV is a client-server based system,
meaning there has to be at least 1 server. The client can also be on the
server and/or on PC's at other locations connected via a network, wired or
wireless. You can also use a client machine as a slave server if you want
to, to add more tuner cards/devices into the system. All clients have
access to all (running) servers. The master server must be running for the
system to work. You can turn off all other client/server machines anytime
you want to. I leave my master server on 24/7, but that's not even
required. Client machines I only turn on when I want to watch recordings,
play dvd's, listen to music, whatever is in the PC. A client machine must
consist of a display card (or onboard video). It doesn't *require* a HDD,
dvd player or anything else other than a keyboard or remote. It can boot
off the network, from a dvd drive (need a KB), or I suppose from a flash
drive, although I've always installed an HDD and DVD player/recorder. if
this doesn't answer your question, then be more specific and ask again.


--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
My Tivo Experience http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/tivo.htm
Tivo HD/S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm
AMD cpu help http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:18:29 -0600, me wrote:

Wes Newell wrote:

I have 4 of my HD tuners in a PC running MythTV. It's not that expensive
to do and you can record as many shows as you like in HD. Total cost for
a 4 tuner system with 500GB drive space shouldn't exceed about $350 if
you shop around. I paid less than $25 each for the HD tuners.

Wes.... what are the specs on that TV "server" you use? is it a low
powered CPU that consumes little electricity since it is on 24/7? A
cheaper CPU maybe?

and...does leaving it on 24/7 significantly impact your electric bill?

Server requirements depend on a lot of factors. To record ATSC takes no
processing. It's received as an mpeg file and is just written straight to
disk. I suspect an old 486 would do it fine. When I had an AMD A64 3000+,
with 4 HDTV tuners in it, it took about 5% cpu usage to record 4 shows at
the same time. And even at that I could still watch an HDTV program and
have plenty of left over power. Same or even less would be true of NTSC as
long as the tuner cards had onboard mpeg encoding. I have never done NTSC.
There's really just no point to it. I went to ATSC to get away from NTSC
anyway. So, for just a recorder, a 486 should do the job well.

It didn't impact my electric bill at all because I've always left my
server running 24/7 for the last 15 years. But that has nothing to do with
MythTV. You don't have to leave it on 24/7.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
My Tivo Experience http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/tivo.htm
Tivo HD/S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm
AMD cpu help http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:45:13 -0500, Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article [email protected],
Wes Newell wrote:

Maybe you have pictures from the hundreds of hours you've spent
making it all work--and continue to spend on a weekly basis.

It usually takes me less than 1 hour to assemble a computer even with
my old age and bad eyes. It takes about another 30 minutes to install
the software to operational condition.

yeah, right.

And we'll just ignore the posts from you about tweaking obscure files to
make this and that work.

For some things I don't use what would be considered plug and play parts
or I don't like some remote codes so I customize them. I also run slave
servers on all my myth boxes. Right now, none of the myth distros handle
this properly so I fix it manually. ost people will never run a slave
server. I don't really need to, but I put 1 tuner in each client box for
the hell of it. i don't use standard remotes either, so I have to
customize that. These are things most people wouldn't screw with. And
since I did it once, I save all my custom files on the main server. it
only takes a couple of minutes to ssh in and copy them to the new box. I
could completely wipe out the drives on my 2 client machines and have them
both back up and running in less than 2 hours. Once you have them running,
all the data settings are stored in the mysql database of the master
srever, so it automatically picks up the old settings when you bring up a
machine using the same name.

It's quite obvious you don't know crap about MythTV, yet you still seem to
want to challenge me about how it works when I've been using it for about
3 years and installed it many times using different metthods from
compiling it from source to using 4 different distros. Some people may say
you're just out to make yourself look silly, but I know the real reason.:-)

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
My Tivo Experience http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/tivo.htm
Tivo HD/S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm
AMD cpu help http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php