Re: OT: TV dictatorship


Martine Riddle wrote:

Robert, where have you been and what are you smoking? I switched over
to DTV with some HD channels Christmas of 2003. It's not compatible?
Who cares? Its WAY better than what you are currently watching and
guess what ? Its still free. Oh I DID buy an antenna but wait, I had an
antenna for analog too. Now I use a PC with an ATI HDTV Wonder card
(soon to be 2 cards) to record and play HDTV when I want and it ISN'T
some whiz-bang PC. It worked fine with a Sempron processor on a cheapo
ECS mamma board. Use it like a TiVo with no monthly charge and
pause/back up/skip commercials on live TV. FCC already mandated TVs to
include ATSC tuners so go buy an inexpensive (<$250 for 27") TV that
can tune the digital today.

Extract head from sand and enjoy.

GG


How is the ATi Card? I have an old WINTV-D, but I cant record more than
4Gigs. and its only 480i. Is the ATI HDTV Wonder better? Hows the software?

Cheers

The ATI software I use is V 9.13. Your 4 gig issue might be OS related.
If you're running FAT32 (which AFAIK is more like FAT21), it has a 4.3
gig file size limit. The software has some bugs but this version rarely
screws up to lose a recording. The most common is a little audio
stuttering in live (no delay) TV. The cure is to pause for a second and
go back to play. It missed 1 hr (scheduled record) of '24' since
January. It typically records 7 hrs/week and 4 more hrs of TiVo like
use. Example, start computer at 10 for CSI but pause it while you do
something else for 20 minutes. Start actual viewing at 10:20 and skip
through the commercials, end at 11 for the news OR start viewing at
10:30 and skip the spots in the news, too.

HDTV Wonder requires Win XP which is NTFS and no reasonable file size
limits. The biggest file on the machine is 19 gig 2.5 hr Rose Parade. I
routinely record 5-10 gig files.

The computer is used only for TV recording, has 300 gig HDD, 1 gig dual
channel RAM , Athlon XP 3000 and an ATI 9600 pro video card running DVI
to a Samsung DLP with the 720p imager. There is no internet access on
this machine so there isn't automatic scheduling but there are no virus
issues either.

I suspect recording HDTV is simpler since the computer simply stores
the MPEG2 stream with no processing, unlike an analog card which needs
to digitize the analog and then encode it.

I'm going to try BeyondTV 4 with 2 tuners to record 2 shows at once for
next season.
The VCR has become a paperweight.

You might like this group.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.tech.hdtv?gvc=2

GG

.

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