Well, I bit the bullet and bought an EyeTV for DTT in time for the
world cup next month.
I love it - Digital quality and the ability to record, pause, rewind
live TV, all for $300 (and a spare computer). But the digital TV
stream is no good for archiving shows, as it uses 2-3 GB per hour.
You need to export to another more efficient format for archiving,
but this is slooow on my 1GHz TiBook. Can anyone give a brief
critique of the various video encoding formats (quality, size, time
to encode) that I might try, including H.264, MPEG-4, DivX etc.? I
tried H.264, but gave up encoding a movie when it was half-finished
in a day (my G5 2x2.7 at work does a similar task in an hour!). I
guess I'll have a Macbook soon enough, so that should help with speed...
But initially, I couldn't get SBS reception - a rather big deal since
I bought the thing for watching the World Cup. I'm in Subiaco and my
analog SBS reception was fairly dodgy, hard to see the football.
After a couple of weeks, I rearranged the gear in my lounge room, and
lo, SBS reception! After some investigation, it turns out that in my
borderline case, the signal quality is EXTREMELY sensitive to the
location of the receiver, even though it remains plugged into the
rooftop aerial.
Next to the computer, signal strength = ~50% and signal quality = 0%.
Relocate it to next to the TV, signal strength ~55 - 60%, signal
quality = 100%. I can turn the signal on and off just by picking up
the receiver box and moving it around just a few inches (55% seems to
be the magic number for reception). I can't explain it, except to
assume that something is providing some kind of interference.
Since you can't automatically tune in your channels until you have
reception, you can use the reception locator to manually tune the
station(s), then find your reception hotspot:
<http://www.dba.org.au/index.asp?sectionID=22>
cheers,
Josh
Josh McKinnon : http://josh.corduroy.biz/ : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
