Post by PaulPost by g***@aol.comI am looking at "Channels" DVR software and the associated package but
it only serves "mobile" clients (Android. Apple etc)
My TVs all have W/7 machines on them. Is there a decent W/7 emulator
that would let me run an Android app?
It looks like the purpose of the clients, is to be traceable
to a phone number or other identifier. Otherwise, I can't imagine
why the selection is so meager. Their intention seems to be, that
an individual would watch TV at Starbucks, with the packets
served by their home router and NAS. And presumably, they are
going to solve the DynDNS problem using authentication from the phone,
so you attempt to connect to the right household :-) The server logs
into the Channels server, and the Channels server notes the server
is at 11.22.33.44 and makes a note of the account. If an Android phone
claims to be Mr.Fretwell, they give the Android phone the 11.22.33.44 value.
"Channels for Android
Running on your phone, tablet, or Android TV device, Channels is the best way to watch your shows."
"Channels for iOS" [Could be a phone and an iPad?]
"Channels for Apple TV"
"Channels for Fire TV"
It is $8 per month, and you get Guide Data.
*******
There are USB and PCI Express tuner devices. The HDHomeRun is merely
a network oriented tuner, that emits packets on Ethernet. This avoids
some amount of driver issues I suppose. But otherwise is weak sauce.
I have nothing against them, except they seem to have stopped making the Prime,
and they're not very honest about it.
https://getchannels.com/docs/getting-started/quick-start-guide/what-is-an-hdhomerun/
"Quick Advice
Antenna - HDHomeRun Connect Quatro <=== ATSC over the air reception. Many ways to do this.
Cable - HDHomeRun Prime <=== is that still available ?
There are likely other ways to do a DVR than that. The Prime model
took a Cable Card (you rent those from the cable company for $5 a month).
This allowed the Prime model to record off cable TV. The Cable Card is for decryption.
They did not destroy the evidence. There is still an entry, but you can't
get there from the front of the site.
https://shop.silicondust.com/shop/product/hdhr3-cc/ # You can look, but can't buy this.
# While it pretends to be out-of-stock,
# I think it is gone for good (long long ago).
The other HDHomeRun are just OTA 8VSB ATSC recorders.
Modern Cable TV is encrypted, to reduce or eliminate theft. Encrypted QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation).
Sure, you can record OTA 8VSB ATSC if you want, but the channel lineup varies
from, say, 50 channels in urban settings, to 1 or 0 channels in rural settings.
New Brunswick, Canada is a "desert" for TV, and it is cable or hit the road Jack.
From a square mileage perspective, much of the country is 1 channel on a good day.
It used to be almost guaranteed you could get the one channel, back in analog days.
The guarantee was removed when digital TV showed up. Thus: desert.
*******
I just have a Hauppauge card in my PC. I have Media Center as a recorder.
I have Hauppauge WinTV as a recorder. The Media Center relied on Guide Data,
that if I were to check right now, there would be no Guide Data.
The channel has encoded, some "what is next" guide data. It would tell you
Gilligans Island was next. If you had a PVR or DVR, I suppose it could start
recording. But real planning uses full Guide Data. Some TV systems, have a full Guide Data
mechanism. But I don't know if that is universal, is carried on a specific channel,
or how that is done. The standards may only cover the "thin" "What is next"
kind of data.
Real TV fanatics, use a multitude of tuners. That's why the various
companies are selling quads.
https://hauppauge.com/pages/products/compare_tuners.html
*******
This is the one I got. I don't consider the NXP 7164 to be all that important,
as it's an encoder from analog NTSC to MPEG2 (for recording). That gives
you a zero CPU overhead when analog recording. But we're solidly in the digital era
now. And the digital chipset (with forward error correction) is the nice part of
this one. This thing can dig into noise and with FEC, I can still have a solid picture
on this, when the STB has walked over the waterfall and gone "black-screen". So the
pixelated blocks are gone, sync is gone, and it is black screen. The waterfall is
only 2dB deep or so. Having the FEC, is like having a Yagi antenna that is a foot longer.
https://hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr2255.html
The problem with chipsets, is they keep going out of production.
The need gets filled with something else. But only when you
receive the product (and do the comparison test as I did),
do you see whether the product is good or not. For example,
the STB I bought, had received rave reviews, but in the end,
it turned out to be a bit of a turkey. The DSP wasn't exactly top
notch, but the ability to letterbox or adjust screen dimensions
were pretty good. There weren't a lot of short squat people on
the screen, or unnecessarily thin tall people on the screen, because
the dimensions were properly handled. But in terms of reception, it
might have been missing FEC (I'm just going from memory here, it's a long
time since I've even looked at tuners, let alone use one).
Having an antenna for your tuner is nice. It took me a month to build this.
It started out a 2D antenna, ended up a 3D antenna, so I had to modify the
design on the fly. If you remove VHF capability, items like this can
be a lot more petite. A lot of the "junk in the back" is for VHF.
The zig-zag thing is UHF. A USENET contributor, provided the dimensions
(it's an existing design, that a software developer wrote an optimizer
and picked new dimensions for the rods). AFAIK, it would use 4NEC2 over and
over again, for design evaluation.
[Picture] Gray Hoverman, VHF+UHF, 15dBi (exactly 50 feet of 1/4" copper tubing)
https://i.postimg.cc/pdrx6Zkv/tv-antenna.gif
If the gain is much higher than that, they get hard to point.
If you had a 30dBi antenna, the pole would need to be an iron giant,
the base poured concrete, to reduce the effects of wind (outdoors).
The antenna I made, is intended for livingroom or attic usage.
In the attic, you lose 6dB because of a wet roof. That's a huge
bite of gain.
I don't know what equipment or experience you've got. The
availability of gubbins for the project, is a lot thinner
than it used to be. No Radioshack any more. Can't get various
F-series at a reasonable price in town. And so on.
And Media Center is not supported any more. And thus, is
not a driver for compatibility. A manufacturer could still
use Media Center compatibility as a selling feature, but
there is no longer "pull" from Media Center users, to help
sell product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DVR_software_packages
Paul
stations I care about. (4 networks and a bunch of "rerun" sub
channels). I have a TiVo that works well for scheduling recordings.
and license the software package to cable operators. Blue Streak uses
it for sure. (my FIL has it)
for anything I tried like recording off the satellite.
be trivial but I haven't bothered. If I want a movie I buy the CD for
$4 on Ebay.
and then go look for a more friendly PC solution. I am going to keep
my eye out for a network tuner cheap, just to play with..
"streamer". I only have Netflix and Prime and "eek" I don't have a
