Raleigh, NC - HDTV - Page 484

I went with A-1 installer when I did the same thing. I'm on the 30/5 RoadRunner plan, and they put up the antenna, ran 2 lines into the living room (plus a third used for the amp on the antenna), ran another line up to the master bedroom, and left the one cable line for RoadRunner alone. I have wired ethernet to all the necessary rooms (2 TV rooms + computer room), and since one TV does not have an ATSC tuner in it I'm using the HDHomeRun connected through MediaCenter on my Windows 7 PC and then through the Xbox 360 to watch live TV in that room. I have a pair of Sony Blu-Ray players that handle most streaming, plus the Xbox 360 as a backup for streaming Netflix (it's a better streamer than the Blu-Ray). I use MediaCenter as a DVR for a handful of broadcast shows.

The whole setup works like a champ, all we're missing is Food Network and ESPN, and we don't miss them $80+/month worth.

Obviously professional installation is the easiest/best way to go, but then you start running into whether you'd be happier just using that money to continue paying the cable bill. Personal choice based on how committed you are to cutting the cord.

Here's what I have: a Mohu leaf antenna ($40), connected to an HD Homerun (currently $60 on Ebay), then I use a Netgear MOCA pair ($79 on EBay, recently discontinued) to get that wired signal via coax to my PC. I get the full 100mbps every time on it, flawlessly. Antenna-fed HDHR connects directly to MOCA#1 via ethernet, then MOCA#1 connects to coax jack in whatever room your antenna is in. At your TV, you take the coax TWC feed from the wall, passive 2-way splitter, one side to your cable modem and one side to MOCA#2. Also ethernet out from MOCA#2 to your router, which I assume also is wired to your HTPC.

So, that's my suggestion, I'm sure everyone has their favorite way. You're out almost $200, but that gives you wired connection, two tuners, OTA reception, just set up your DVR via Win7 and you're in good shape.

And if that gets you through until next football season, you can hop back onto TWC at their introductory cheap rate if you decide you don't like it, just have to make sure you've saved at least $200 in cable bills and you "break even".

$200 is not even 2 full cable bills for me (DirecTV). You people must have some small channel packages or something!

I tried the leaf, but it didn't work for me when connected directly to the main TV. The TV is on an inside wall of the town home and I just couldn't get more than PBS.

I actually have an older set of Linksys powerline adapters that I use to get my internet to my wife's desktop and my other htpc in our bedroom upstairs. It gets roughly 50-60mbps, but it streams HD video files without an issue.

Yeah I mean if I could find a way to pull it off without doing the wiring, that would be great since I don't plan on staying in this place that much longer, but definitely want to wire up my next house properly.

Oh and my current TWC bill is 173 bucks (It was like 140ish before that). If I went 50/5 data only, that's 100 bucks plus tax or so.. We literally watch nothing via TWC cable outside of the football I watch and can get mostly OTA (or through someone else's login on espn3). Even the stuff we let the kiddo watch is strictly netflix stuff now (Yo Gabba Gabba, Blues Clues, Sesame Street, etc).

I see that the Universal sports or whatever it was called is now gone from OTA lineup and replaced by the old Standby a "Weather Channel" I hope it does not get replaced by yet another music video channel.

I will miss the winter Sports subchannel.

We just dropped TWC and are looking to set up OTA reception. We are currently getting 2, 4, 5, 20, 22, 28, 40, 43, 45, and 50 when we move the antenna around (currently an old Terk powered antenna on 2nd floor). Needless to say, we have to move the antenna around a lot to get some of these stations (and pray in some cases. . .). We have ordered a leaf plus, and hope that helps.

I wanted to know if anyone in Chapel Hill has had good luck getting these stations and 11 and 17? Has anyone used the leaf plus? Also, considering adding a DVR if we can get good reception if anyone has thoughts on this.

I included our information from TV Fool if this helps.

If you've already got powerline adapters, I'd give those a shot with the HDHomerun and an antenna. Figure each OTA stream is max 15mbps so you're good with that.

My experience, I cut the cord 9 months ago and don't plan on getting it back any time soon. I had Windstream DSL at an introductory rate for $29.99/mo for 6 months, and when they wouldn't cut me a deal after that, I hopped to TWC internet 3 months ago at $29.99 for 12 months, paying for 10mbps but never receive less than 18, up to 30mbps down outside of peak hours. Upload stuck at 1mbps but not an issue for me. So no cable bill and $30 per month for internet, do the math on savings over 18 months. I have whole house DVR via windows 7 and XBox, which is 4 TVs plus a laptop in the kitchen and can stream live tv or recordings to my iPad at home or away from home. I'm not missing much. My wife tapes her daily soaps and our favorite sitcoms and Bachelor, etc., and we have 70 recorded HD episodes of Sesame Street and at least 10 of all the other PBS favorites for my daughter on the hard drive. I supplement with netflix streaming but probably less than 10 hours a month. There's plenty of TV on OTA if you can record things and watch them later.

Which brings me to OTA TV. I live in Durham by Southpoint Mall and get about 40 channels. I have an HD Homerun and two antennas. I have the Mohu leaf inside a second story bedroom on a bookshelf, pointed towards Greensboro and fed into a cheap amplifier from Lowe's. I also have a $20 monoprice indoor/outdoor antenna (that comes with its own amplifier) pointed towards Garner for the Raleigh stations. Each feeds an HDHR tuner and pulls in all the expected major channels from the respective cities. The thing that was absolutely invaluable for getting good reception was the combination of the HDHR and an iOS app called SignalGH. It gives you real-time signal strength for your antenna reception. So I'd hold my iPad in in one hand and antenna in the other. Set it to monitor feeds simultaneously from two channels, and move the antenna around. I found that a 3 inch move could be the difference between no reception and perfect stream, so there's no way I could have guessed at that. Moral there is that you can probably get great reception with most antennas with proper placement and a way to measure whether you've got proper placement.

And I'm going to miss Universal Sports. Didn't watch it much, but more than I thought I would.

Hrm.. I do have an extra powerline adapter not being used at the moment. My question is, if I did get an HDHomerun, how does it pass the signal to the computer? do I still need some type of tuner card or is it all software based on the PC side.

Edit - just ordered an HDHomeRun from Amazon. 90$, it's new and I'll have it on Friday as opposed to what currently looks like 70 (so far, it has 4 bids) for a used one on ebay and who knows when it would arrive.

BTW... If you don't get good reception with the HDHR, try a USB or PCIe tuner with an LG or Samsung chipset. The HDHR's tuners are optimized for low power consumption, and are *NOT* very good tuners for general OTA reception, especially if you have less than ideal conditions (indoor or attic antenna, wooded lot, low mount in an urban area, etc). At least where I used to live (Cary, 4 miles from RDU, wooded lot) I could *never* get the HDHR to perform reliably with an attic antenna. I have slightly better luck where I am now (roughly the same condition, but with a tiny local airport in the mix, rather than RDU), but I still use the HDHR mainly for QAM, and for tuning my OTA reception.

FWIW, I've had excellent luck with these 2 USB tuners:
http://www.amazon.com/KWorld-ATSC-Di...5691003&sr=8-6
http://www.amazon.com/Pinnacle-PCTV-...691003&sr=8-12

If you're using Linux, beware that the UB435Q has 2 versions, and the later version does not work with Linux.

Drew

Yeah, I've heard that the HDHR isn't great for reception, but it's always worked for me and the network sharing is a nice benefit.

You'll plug it into your extra powerline adapter and it'll be on the network. From there, you go to any PC you want to use it on, go to silicondust.com and download the software, and the PC will automatically find the HDHR if they're on the same network. It's amazingly simple and cool. Well, as long as the firewall isn't an issue. If it doesn't work at first, turn off your PC's firewall/antivirus for a moment and see if it works, then adjust settings if necessary. That stumped me for hours on my first install.

No additional cards needed, and any PC in the house can share the two tuners. And as just mentioned, it can get OTA or QAM depending on what you tell it to do, so use it to check if you have any ClearQAM channels coming through your TWC, you can supplement your OTA with whatever is coming through.

It'll make a lot more sense when your box shows up on Friday.

Anyone here have only the 50mb down RR plan from TWC? I've heard that normally if you go internet only, they put a filter at the street to block the unencrypted QAM channels, but with the 50mb plan they can't put the filter on. Wondering if that was accurate or not. If true, it would save me the issue of an antenna lol.

Yes, the network aspect is quite nice. So nice that when I needed to use ATSC tuners in FreeBSD, I was considering taking an old wireless router, adding some USB sticks, and writing some software to speak the HDHR protocol so that I'd essentially have a "clone" HDHR with tuners that don't suck. But then I stumbled on a project that lets Linux USB drivers work in FreeBSD, so I never got around to it..

Drew

Same here. A weather map is no substitute.

Especially when the Directv AM21 tuner still lists the Universal Sports line-up on 17-3... Universal Sports is Directv ch. 625 if anyone has the Sports Pack, but seeing a channel go from free OTA to pay is sad.

Alright well I've got it up and running and have TV going on my main HTPC with it. I need to go in and tweak channel names and what not, but I've got all the major networks, so that's all I really care about. Will watch the playoffs with it this weekend, and if that goes well, I'll be bringing my cable boxes in on monday and schedule the 50mb upgrade.

Congratulations! I'm sure there are a bunch of others on here also running OTA TV through their PC's and happy to help make your transition smoother, but sounds like you're well on your way. A good remote and the DVR functionality will make it so you (almost) never look back.

Well like I said, I've had HTPC's set up for a while..harmony remotes upstairs and down.

I've got it all set up now though...

http://www.silicondust.com/forum/vie...df811c1ff97500

That thread is actually someone here in the area that wrote up a walk-through on how to add/rename/configure stations that don't come through.


Of course, once I drop cable, we'll see if they put the filter on or not when I upgrade to the 50/5 plan. If they do, I'll have to get an antenna and do it all again.


I do get some pixelation here and there, and I can't watch anything on my laptop (wireless) when the baby monitor is on lol. But I'll survive.

Installed an hdhomerun utility on my phone that shows signal strength, Data rate, etc..

When I started on the 10/1 internet service (no Cable TV service) - I found I had access to most of the local channels in clear QAM (exception being channel 11 - WTVD). There's also a few other clear QAM channels as well.

TWC has WTVD HD mapped at like 99.3 or something crazy like that. WMC didn't find it, but I added it manually and it was fine.



I'm having ridiculous pixelation/audio breakups trying to watch the football game on NBC right now though. It's on and off..

A lot of the posts in this thread deal with how to stream internet content from a PC to a TV that also receives OTA broadcasts via antenna.

How complicated is that, and how close is that experience to just watching cable or satellite TV?

I assume that all of the connections can be done as wired connections so that everything is secure. How fast of a broadband internet connection is needed, and how much TV content is freely available over the internet?

Finally, if you use a cable TV provider for broadband internet service and you decide to not use that provider for TV, will that provider restrict the content that you can access via the internet?

It looks like we might be moving from Alamance County to Orange or Durham County sometime in the somewhat near future. Playing around on the Directv website to see what non-Raleigh DMA locals were sig-viewed in various towns, I see many towns include WGHP and WFMY, as expected. I was surprised to see many areas have WRIC ch 8 from Richmond, VA listed. Does anyone actually have this channel in NC? It's on the 119 satellite so the regular 3-LNB dish won't see it.

Time Warner restricts ESPN3/WatchESPN access to those who have a cable plan with ESPN (based on TWC username/password). Similarly, HBO Go would be restricted to HBO subscribers.

Outside of that, TWC doesn't restrict access to Netflix, Hulu, or similar items, although if they ever move to data caps, it could be an issue.

Nothing is restricted on TWC's end. The "restricting" is done by ESPN, and it is a case of ESPN not following internet practices & allowing access to everybody, or only paid subscribers. Rather they're doing something unique: they're requiring ISPs to fork over cash per broadband subscriber in order to be allowed access to ESPN. Eg, they're trying to "bundle" themselves with all broadband subscriptions, the same way they're bundled with (and increase the cost of) traditional cable plans.

TWC has a fairly unique deal. They held out for a long time & refused to pay ESPN's ransom. They finally secured a deal where they paid per cable subscriber, rather than per broadband subscriber. If what ESPN is doing becomes common practice, then we can look forward to the bad old days of cable's bundled enterainment packages when we sign up for broadband. So I applaud TWC for not caving in to ESPN. I'd much rather pay ESPN directly, like every other internet content distributor. This whole "pay per ISP" thing just leaves a terrible, rancid taste in my mouth.

FWIW, I recently moved to VA, where I now have Comcast. They did cave to ESPN, and my broadband is much more expensive than it was in NC (or it will be, once I get out of the new subscriber discount window). I'd love to know how much I'm paying ESPN. I've watched ESPN3 on my XBox360, and the quality is rather impressive. It is mostly better than analog cable, and often near HD quality. But it is streamed, and it is much more glitchy than Amazon VOD. Oh, and there are ads. Usually the same damned 3 or 4 ads every single break.

Drew

I'd love to watch ESPN3 via the Xbox but of course, TWC doesn't support it.

TWC held out for the deal with those terms, hence I'm terming it TWC's restriction. I don't think that's unfair. (They do the same thing for the Big Ten Network streaming as well, although the ESPN auth process seems to work much better.)


I can't in good conscience applaud TWC for enforcing restrictions that merely incentivize people to pay for an entire cable package just to get internet stream content. It's not as if TWC wants ESPN to offer it as a pay service to any subscriber, as that takes the money out of TWC's pockets entirely.

In any case, no ads for me here with ESPN3, though.

I think its toward the middle of the evil spectrum. Eg:

- ISP's pay per-subscriber for access to ESPN3 (most evil)
- ISP's tie access to ESPN3 to cable ESPN subscription (slightly less evil)
- ESPN learns how to handle money, like all the other streaming services, and people subscribe if they want to (not evil).

I have to say it does suck that they haven't figured out the XBox360 authentication thing. Having dealt with MS from a "partner" perspective at work, I'd be 99.9% sure that ESPN needed some sort of API change to support what they want, and MS has promised to roll it out "in the next update" which takes years sometimes. Though why they just cannot use whatever mechanism Netflix uses baffles me.


I wonder if comcast or MS is inserting them? I've only watched a few things, and all of them were live..

Drew

I watch a show on WRDC on my non-HD TV. It's one I've watched for years. Since the change to HD, the audio on the show is terrible. The TV is on TimeWarner cable. The problem is either with TW or with the TV station. Does anybody have a clue what's going on? The sound is very brittle, and it's the same on every TV in the house.

Veedon "A lot of the posts in this thread deal with how to stream internet content from a PC to a TV that also receives OTA broadcasts via antenna.

How complicated is that, and how close is that experience to just watching cable or satellite TV?"

You will find links to what appears to be Streamed ABC, NBC , and so on. But typically the links just take you directly to the ABC website that has a subset of the full days broadcast that you can stream. They are great for catching up on a prime time show you missed like "Panam"

There are acceptions but they are not always easy to find or legal.

There are options with XBMC but not always reliable options. i.e. Freecable

Unless of course you are talking UVers which I do not know much about accept it is not free

To answer my own question, the guy just left, I now have 50/5 roadrunner, and I still have my unencrypted QAM through my HDHomeRun. Life is good!


Also, the tech I had was very nice. I told him from the start I wanted to use my networking equipment. He said no problem, gave me the admin login to the modem and told me how to switch it to bridge mode and told me how to reset it in case I wanted to use their wireless.

You have all your locals from the clearqam? I have the normal RR and get all clearqam above channel 83, but nothing lower. So no PBS, WTVD, or some others, but get NBC 17, WRAL, and WRAZ. That'd be interesting to know that difference. Glad the TV setup is working out for you.