Canadian TV is still analog for the near future, right?

[ghostjmf]

from an article

http://www.hdtvantennalabs.com/hdtv-antenna-hype.php

on HD antennas (antennae):

You may ask why there are so many "HDTV antennas" on the market. HDTV is a fancy buzzword. HDTV is cool. It sells. HDTV antenna is nothing but a hype. Don't be fooled by the ubiquitous ads promoting HDTV antennas and HDTV optimized antennas. These antennas are HDTV antennas indeed, but to no lesser extent they are "SDTV antennas", "EDTV antennas" and "NTSC antennas". Let's say all of them are just TV antennas.

When choosing an antenna for HDTV, check the really important parameters such as directivity, gain, F/B ratio. These specifications are important for reception of both, digital and analog broadcasts. Consult our step-by-step HDTV antenna selection guide and read antenna reviews. The HDTV optimization is probably the least important factor you should take into account.

[ghostjmf]

I dunno if I truly believe this, but I'm watching it, aren't I?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWQhlmJTMzw

[Bob Juch]

I hope you now see there is such a thing as an HDTV antenna.

[ghostjmf]

BobJuch says:

I hope you now see there is such a thing as an HDTV antenna.

Well, exhousemate broke the hammer & of course didn't replace it. (& yes, a hammer is a hard thing to break, but it can be done.) But I have to buy one anyway, now. Wire cutters I believe exhousemate stole, because they don't seem to be around. OK, one more purchase I'd probably be making at some point. Board I can probably root around & get somewhere, though I bet they're for sale too. Wire coat hangers I got rid of a while ago, but I bet there are few lingering somewhere in the house. Garden-variety UHF antenna I can buy (I actually have one affiliated with my radio system in some way, but I will buy as directed).

If I was feeling crafty enough, I could do this one!

Or I could look for a really-cheap HD antenna which fulfills those specs about directivity, gain & F/B ratio. If one such exists.

What a lot of this HD info is hammering home is that all this HD broadcasting is on the puny UHF bands. Which means after-the-change I can kiss goodbye all those New Hampshire & Rhode Island stations. Cable & satellite don't provide them either, as they are considered redundant network broadcasts. But they sure have come in handy if Boston is having any emergency news bulletin that NH or RI don't think is such an emergency, & choose to run the scheduled programming.

[Bob Juch]

Right now HDTV is broadcast on UHF channels. After the analog shut-off, they could move back to their old analog frequencies.

[ghostjmf]

ha ha! Thread that never dies! Even if I am talking to myself, with occasional input, not always 100% accurate, from BobJ in it.

The "not always 100% accurate" thingie applied to BobJ who I normally get along with but who in this thread might just have been actively trying to frost the easily-frostible (frostable?) me is:

He'd said that you can get TiVO without renting one through your cable system. True, but they almost exclusively are advertised through cable systems. And rented, not bought outright. But I did find a web site that lamely offers a few models for bought-outright.

What you get mainly from forums, rather than TiVO's own web site, is that that easy-to-use "pick your show" feature only works if you subscribe to a monthly service. It is not clear to me whether the regular-VCR-type "time, date, station" programming menu is even available on these machines. If I was really into them, I would have dug for that info, to be sure.

Also, TiVO needs info cards from your cable company put into special slots for them in order to make the machine compatible to get the channels from your cable company. This all revolves around you having a cable company. To be fair, the machine apparently can get straight antenna input too, without a card-in-slot, but nobody using an antenna seems to be using TiVO.

But never fear. My buds at DTVPal, the company formerly known as EchoStar, which split off from Dish Network just so that it could sell its sorta-excellent machines directly to to people who don't (yet) subscribe to Dish Network (which is satellite, not cable, for any who don't yet know that), have come up with the Machine For Me; --Sorta.

Does slice bread, but does not cut its own DVDs. Grrr. Also, does not take the US Govt free-pass cards, even though it does offer an analog-out signal. Because its a DVR, & DVRs don't qualify for the coupons even if they do act as a convertor box too.

This thing has an output of HD digital signal for "when my TV dies & has to be replaced', along with its analog-out signal. The analog-out signal is, however, only providing mono sound, something I'm gonna hate but which is apparently true, anyway, of all other convertor boxes. I think. Gotta check. But the industry thinks "if you don't care about a high-def picture on your little 13" TV which because of its small size gives a very clear picture anyway, you don't care about stereo sound either". Oh yeah? But if I pipe it through my am-fm tuner/amplifier to good speakers, as I often do now, via one of the VCR's outputs, with the stereo signal my ancient TV can't handle anyway, I'll at least get better-sounding mono sound.

It also has an ethernet port, & a USB port. Not sure TiVOs have that, but I admit I haven't checked. The USB port will become important when I try to hook a disc-burning machine up to it. Which I will have to, if I want to save programs & occasionally give one to someone, instead of relying on stuff being saved on the internal hard disc. We all know what eventually happens to stuff "saved", but not backed up, on internal hard discs.

Of course, these ports would be important too if I had a computer at home to hook up to it, which currently I don't.


And "of course" this wonder, once called EchoStar TR50, now called DTVPal DVR, can record 2 shows at one time. While you watch a 3rd, if you want. Just like the latest TiVOs. And of course TiVO has sued. Either DTVPal people don't care, or they won the latest stage of the suit, because they're finally shipping these babies, after a long, long delay.

I for one am going to wait. Because I went out & got my DTVPal connector-boxes-only, then found out they had a bug in the timer, the feature I bought this brand for, because only one other (& hard-to-find) convertor box even has a timer. With absolutely no easy-exchange policy offered. Sears, where I bought mine, doesn't even carry the fix, dubbed DTVPal+Plus (yeah, that's 2 pluses on the face of the box), & billed as "having an enhanced tuner", which I'm sure it does, but which also has a de-bugged timer, according to the tech-talk groups, too.

So my sister is going to order DTVPal+Pluses for me, with her coupons, after she gets her coupons that is. And I am going to give her my as-yet-unopened DTVPal(no plus)s, because she is interested as having these as backup for the old TV & the VCRs, post-digital-transition, in the event of cable-failure, but wouldn't be using the timer feature on any regular basis, only the convertor.

And when DTVPal DVR gets whatever bugs it comes with worked out, &, better yet (dream on self) builds in a DVD burner, I will buy one.

Meanwhile, my sister's Panasonic DVR-with-disc-burner is spoken of very highly on the tech-talk circuits, but you can only buy one used, a Panasonic or any other brand, because the industry just doesn't make these anymore.

One problem people speak of having is a machine that clunks out when you try to copy a copy-protected disc. Silly people, they knew that stuff was built in to the machines. Apparently it kicks on for some not-copy-protected discs too, though. My sister says she's never had that problem burning discs, but she's never tried to copy a disc, copy-protected or otherwise, but only made copies of TV shows she's recorded to the hard drive.

[ghostjmf]

oops: That stereo-ouput question; the DTVPal web site says that all their boxes give stereo-output. Something I read somewhere else says that the DVR only has it for the HD jack, not the convertor-box jack. Unless I misread something into something I read. I shall wait for future reviews, once the product actually ships. To other people 1st.

It kinda sucks being an early-adopter of a retro-tech fit thingie (a convertor box) & find out that it has a bug (the timer bug on the DTVPal-no-plus, now re-renamed the TR40) before you've even opened the literal box it comes in.

[Estonut]

Meanwhile, my sister's Panasonic DVR-with-disc-burner is spoken of very highly on the tech-talk circuits, but you can only buy one used, a Panasonic or any other brand, because the industry just doesn't make these anymore.

Huh?

[ghostjmf]

Estonut says:

Huh?

You can buy a DVR new & you can buy a disc burner new but you can't buy new a DVR (which records onto a hard drive, generally speaking) that also directly burns stuff from that drive onto a DVD.

You can buy new any manner of stuff that lets you connect by cable to a seperate DVD-burning device. But that's yet an additional purchase.

If you already own or rent a machine that lets you burn DVDs directly from its hard drive using built-in circuitry & a burner that's part of the machine, even if you are a slave to the TiVO franchise (which requires card slotted into the DVR from your cable company to make the cable programs "work", & requires monetary subscription to a service that lets you click on what programs you want to record; I dunno if TiVOs even have an old-fashioned VCR-like channel/time/speed event-timer screen, though I could check), keep that bond of slavery. Because the new models don't burn DVDs.

Not yet anyway. There are a whole bunch of new machines that play DVDs out there, all equipped to play Blu-Ray, & to transmogrify (they usually say "upconvert") your piddley-to-them not-High-Def signal off an old disc to something that "looks almost as good as High-Def" (well, it gets as close as it can, under the circumstances) but most of these machines are players-only. Few burn discs, & the few that even do are still not machines with TV-tuners & hard drives in them.

[etaoin22]

Canadian TV does have a lot of people talking to themselves, at the best of times. Start with the House of Commons and the Assemblée Nationale,

[etaoin22]

ha ha! Thread that never dies! Even if I am talking to myself,

Canadian TV does have a lot of people talking to themselves, at the best of times. Start with the House of Commons and the Assemblée Nationale,

[Jeemie]

This thread is hurting my head......

lb13

Mine too.

Good thing this switchover doesn't affect me in the slightest.

[Estonut]

You can buy a DVR new & you can buy a disc burner new but you can't buy new a DVR (which records onto a hard drive, generally speaking) that also directly burns stuff from that drive onto a DVD.

Ghost, my "Huh?" was a link to Amazon showing about 4 pages of units, most of which do exactly what you describe.

[ontellen]

I haven't watched TV on anything but cable since the 60's. I still remember watching TV through a black and white haze of snow with an aerial. Since we are 90 miles from Buffalo, we never got good reception no matter which way we turned our aerial.

I am sick of seeing the ads for this on the Buffalo stations - they've been running for about 6 months now. If people haven't caught on yet, then they're ludites who would find watching TV a mental challenge.

[ghostjmf]

All I see is a word "Huh?", not a link. Since people are colorizing their posts these days, how am I to know, without a web address, if color means "I am a link" or just "I like this color"?

I will check your Amazon links, but as I've been checking actual manufacurer new-machine sites for days, I doubt, Amazon being Amazon, that all of its items are new models, rather than "pre-owned". I'd prefer to buy stuff-with-a-hard-disc new, if at all affordable. And vetted by somebody who knows computers 1st if
not new, not just "somebody who knows how to sell on Amazon".

And if I were subscribing to cable, I'd be leary of getting any machine the cable-company wasn't peddling as a rental, because it would have to accept the cable-company's linkage card.

My sister's cable company recently downgraded its service to any machine that isn't accepting the cable-company's linkage card. The connection she gets through the connection that goes through the cable company's "extra channels" box still looks great. Since she doesn't want to mess with putting their card in her DVR, which isn't the machine touted by that company & rented by that company, suddenly the shows she gets through the cable split (a legal pre-extra-channels-box split they know about), which used to look great, look "snowy".

And at any rate, since I don't plan on subscribing to cable in the near future (I can't afford it, I'd prefer satellite if I ever do go for a paid service, & neither the cable companies nor satellite in the Boston area yet offer all the stations I would want on one plan, but they make you get & pay for lots of stations I don't want; Verizon's mix-&-match plan hasn't been marketed in Boston yet) any machine I need has to convert to analog as well as both record to hard disc & burn DVDs.

In a previous world, such as the stereo world, I would want a series of linked components, each of which did one or two things best, & did only them. My stereo does have an am/fm tuner linked to an amplifier all-in-one (I was never that much of a purist to get them all seperate) but my speakers certainly are picked-by-me, & linked to the amp/tuner by wires, not built in. And my turntable & CD player likewise are seperate components, not built-in.

However, in the DVD-burning world, there are just too many stories of equipment that is supposed to be compatible with other equipment just not sending/getting the right signals that I'm afraid of chancing it.

[ghostjmf]

OntEllen says:

I haven't watched TV on anything but cable since the 60's. I still remember watching TV through a black and white haze of snow with an aerial. Since we are 90 miles from Buffalo, we never got good reception no matter which way we turned our aerial.

I am sick of seeing the ads for this on the Buffalo stations - they've been running for about 6 months now. If people haven't caught on yet, then they're ludites who would find watching TV a mental challenge.

Lessee: I used to live in Northwest Ohio. My dad got cable in the 60s, when it came out, since he was tired of hiring people to go up on the roof & fix/knock snow (that is literal snow, & ice) off of the antenna. Wierdly enough, this only became a problem when we moved to a suburb; when we were living closer in, we also had an antenna, just as much literal snow & ice, & few problems with it. Of course, we were then closer to the broadcast stations (except for the Canadian one in Windsor & all the Detroit stations) & had the antenna on the top of a 2-story-with-attic house instead of a ranch house.

Then I moved to Arizona, lived in rented apartments & wasn't watching much TV anyway; I couldn't afford cable & tuned in whatever I could tune in, which I do remember as being at least a couple networks & PBS.

Then I moved to the Boston area. Despite lots of warnings that "I would need cable", neither of the apartments I've lived in, one in Cambridge & the current one in Somerville, need cable for good reception. I am not living 90 miles from the local stations, I am living maybe 20 miles from all the stations that broadcast from Needham, a suburb of Boston, & I-haven't-clocked-it from the Great Blue Hills, which are neither Great, Blue, nor much of Hills, are in a different direction, & are where WGBH, the Boston "flagship" PBS station, gets its call letters. I have no trouble pulling any of these stations in with an in-house antenna. On the 3rd floor, where I live.

My landlord, when I moved in, forbade roof-antennae in the lease. That didn't stop various people on the 1st floor from hooking their satellite dishes to the "best" wall of the building. I'd like to think they at least warned the landlord 1st. But I don't like to tempt fate, & get good reception with my inside antenna (pressed against a window) anyway.

So exactly how are me, & people like me, "luddites who would find watching TV a mental challenge"? How is not shelling out for a service you don't need (& which in both the Boston area & Northwest Ohio treats their customers dreadfully, by all reports I get from family & friends; dropping networks you want, dropping connectivity without you paying for a more expensive package, etc; for a while there, my sister's service was sparring with the local NBC affiliate, & threatened "no NBC after September", forgetting I guess that they also piped in Detroit's NBC station) suddenly reflective of my ability to keep up with the times, or IQ?

Most cable companies in the US promise to offer analog service until 2012. That's only 3 years away. I promise you, when they drop their analog service, you are going to hear a lot more wails from "luddites", but they'll be luddites who have had cable as long as you have had it, that time around. Some of these old analog TV sets just keep chugging. Why would people want to shell out for HDTVs anyway when the cable company can, as they've done with my sister's non-premium-channel arm of service, turn crystal clear reception yesterday into low-grade reception today with a flick of "cable itself isn't enough; we now want you to buy our extra connectivity card too"?

[christie1111]

This thread is hurting my head......

lb13

Mine too.

I just finally clicked on this thread to see what could possibly take up 2 pages.

Did you notice how similar the avatars of Ghost and BobJ are?

[littlebeast13]

Did you notice how similar the avatars of Ghost and BobJ are?

LOL!!!

lb13

[ghostjmf]

christie1111 says:

Did you notice how similar the avatars of Ghost and BobJ are?

Mine is younger, cuter & weighs less.

"younger" & "weighs less" are for sure reversed in real life. "Cuter" is, as always, a matter of opinion.


And its "ghost", by the way. Case is very important.

[ontellen]

Pardon me but I didn't say that people who don't have cable are luddites. I said anyone who hasn't gotten the message about broadcasting going digital and analog TVs being outdated is a luddite since they have been advertising this (by running crawls across many shows) for over 6 months now.

[ghostjmf]

ontellen says:

Pardon me but I didn't say that people who don't have cable are luddites. I said anyone who hasn't gotten the message about broadcasting going digital and analog TVs being outdated is a luddite since they have been advertising this (by running crawls across many shows) for over 6 months now.

Sorry, please pardon me for taking offense, then. In this group, ya never know 'til ya know. Well, actually in this group I pretty well do know, but some still have the capacity to surprise me, & I was sad to think you were one of them, & happy now not to think it.

As to the actual topic:

If you just got out of the Peace Corps or whatever, you might actually not know about the (USA-an) Digital Era beginning mid-Feb. Various cities (Boston area, & My Home Town for 2) have done advertised tests ("if you are getting this stupid message instead of regular programming, your set is not ready"), which are better at helping people realize their sets need a convertor-box (or cable! ..until 2012, that is) than the continual crawl does.

[ghostjmf]

Ha ha ha like anyone really wanted one (update that is) ha ha ha...

Both converter boxes hooked up & working. And I can still, after turning them off but not disconnecting anything, watch TV the "old" way as long as analog signals live on. This is not entirely unexpected, because I have all along been able to watch TV on my TV when my VCRs are off, even though the antenna goes (split) into the VCRs, & the VCRs output to the TV.

You would think the antenna would need to go directly into the TV for the TV to get decent reception when not fed a signal from a VCR tuner, but mine has always apparently responded to off VCRs as "big pieces of metal hooked onto the antenna; good!".

So now the antenna, split, goes to the converter boxes, & each outputs to a VCR, each of which outputs to the TV. Yes, I have a switch that tells the TV which VCR is on & sending a signal to it. Well, now its "which converter/VCR pair is sending a signal to it".

If the converter is on but the VCR is off, the signal goes right through the VCR anyway, apparently, to the TV. If the VCR is on, & set to channel #3, I can use it to record.

If the converter is off, I can watch good old broadcast analog. And tune in & record stuff on the VCR on the analog broadcast channels.

Fox, which broadcasts House, Bones, Fringe, a new show I wanna try tonight, & a lot of political malarky (though their local news coverage is getting good marks from some fairly independent sources), has ceased broadcasting analog in the Boston area several weeks ago. If you e-mail them they will tell you "we are having temporary problems", which is of course a lie; several weeks is not a "temporary problem". Didn't matter to me 'til House et al came back this week.

So for now I watch the Fox shows via converter, everything else the old way.

There is a major problem with the converter boxes' clocks, which you cannot set. Because this brand did not program in a manually settable clock. Apparently, they get their signal from whatever station you are tuned to (according to discussions elsewhere on the net), & a lot of stations broadcast a bad clock signal.

So I will be adjusting for a lot of time variance until I find out if the new, improved models of the converters have fixed this.

I do not, it turns out, need a better UHF antenna for those digital broadcasts, which are on the UHF band. I am still using my cheapo Radio Shack antenna, with an amplifier on it. I bought the amplifier years ago so that I could get a Rhode Island UHF station more clearly. The idiot at Radio Shack did not point out that I really should be getting a better UHF antenna, not, or not just an amplifier. (Also the idiot me, who did not think to look this up before I bought the amplifier.) Strangely, I did get that Rhode Island UHF station more clearly. Anyway!

And now I get 20 UHF digital signals on my crummy Radio Shack mostly-VHF antenna-with-amplifier. The scanner built in to the converter boxes did this for me. All the regular stations, PBS's new digital-only stations, & a few gratis broadcast digital stations I will not be watching; religion, cartoons.

I do not, however, get the 3 New Hampshire or 2 Rhode island stations I used to get. (One of the Rhode Island stations is a UHF station, at least it is for analog broadcasts.) I will look up what their real #s are, as opposed to their mapped-to-old-analog #s, & try to program them in. Don't have much hope, though. If I find out that there is some magical UHF antenna out there that actually pulls in UHF digital broadcasts from 70 (NH) & 50 (RI) miles away, I might spring for that better UHF antenna. I doubt anything will pull those stations in, though. The digital premise seems to be "broadcast for a 35 mile area, 45 at best".

And I had a little problem with both identical DTVPal converter boxes being controlled by each other's remote. Apparently, this is not a rare problem with equipment & remotes, but I'd never encountered it before. Well, I encountered it when some neighbor was sending out a signal that completely swamped the VCR I was using at the time, but the cure for that at the time was "new, less sensitive to wierd signals VCR". This time around, I explored the "lead hat" option (for the converter boxes, not me) via those lead wraps photo stores sell to keep your film safe from airport X-rays. This method works, but you have to remember to keep all the equipment, remotes & converters, under the lead wraps. Even when using the remote.

What is less annoying, though very annoying in general, turns out to be to put the converter I am going to not use so often around the corner from the TV in another room, seperated by a radiator on each side of the wall. I just couldn't find a decent-to-use position in the room the Tv is in that didn't pick up reflected IR signals from the remotes. You can turn these converters on even if you point the remote backwards. So, when I want to use that converter, I go stand by the wall, point the remote at the converter, then peer around the corner to look at the TV to make sure I've done what I think I've done, command-wise. If littlebeast wants to use his leisure time redoing my portrait, this would I think make a good one. "Pee" is not being being mentioned this time around. Though stronger words may be. Which I'm not telling.

I can, however, sit in my chair & point my remote at the converter hooked up to most-favored-VCR without turning on/off that converter around the corner. Which was the whole point of this rearrangement.

(I did just copy a set of instructions to reprogram a remote for one of DTV's DVR's remotes to be "for one machine only". DTV product users have had this problem a lot; there are whole pages discussing it on the net. I don't believe the screens necessary appear on my puny DTVPal's converter's menu, but its worth a look for them.)