right on bro!

Supercomputer is now able to record over-the-air HDTV thanks to the pchdtv HD-3000 card and the Zenith Silver Sensor antenna. It was a total pain in the butt trying to get it to work, but thanks to somebody on the mythtv-users mailing list, and my Linux-head co-worker, it’s rolling.

Observations:

• All of the digital TV transmitters in Los Angeles are located on Mt. Wilson (which is, I think, near Arcadia). So, apparently the best thing to get is a highly directional antenna (such as the Silver Sensor).
• Antenna placement is crucial. I had the antenna on top of my TV and wasn’t getting much signal. Finally, I bought a longer cable and stuck it on top of the bookshelf next to my window. Much better.
• HDTV streams are huge - an hour is 7.4 GB of space.
• I’m still getting stuttering for the first 3-4 seconds in xine when playing recordings, but it’s probably fixable through configuration or minor hardware upgrade. It eventually smooths itself out.
• A couple of people have asked how I’m outputting HDTV to a standard-definition TV. Well, MythTV captures in HD, but I use xine (which is like Windows Media Player for Linux) to play back the media file, and it downscales it to fit my TV. Have you ever downloaded a DVD rip from BitTorrent and played it on your standard definition TV? It looks like that. I’ll take this downscaled HDTV over plain old analog TV any day - it looks much, much better.

So, mission accomplished. The next steps are to try to solve some of the stuttering/load issues, fix some occasional crashes when watching the live HDTV stream, put the components in some kind of HTPC case. Unfortunately the case I want isn’t available yet, so I’ll have to wait for another month or so.