Blog

So Jen and I have found that many of our weekly TV show recordings coincide with hockey games. As long as there is only one show recording, all is fine, but when there are two shows and a live game on, we have to choose not to record one of the shows. We tried getting around this by using Hulu to see the missed shows but playing that on the TV was not enjoyable. AT&T Uverse has not made it up the road to us yet so their 4 tuner box is not an option. After some reading I decided to buy a AVerTVHD Duet TV tuner for our Windows7 desktop and plug it into the cable and use Windows Media Center and the XBox as an extender. The card two tuners and only gets ATSC and ClearQAM channels so it should be able to get all of the HD cable channels and just not the NTSC cable channels, or at least that is what I thought. Well after fighting with some bad coax cable and some odd tuning by the card, I only ended up with two channels and a few subchannels!. Not exactly what I had in mind. I did some research at AntennaWeb and found that most of the broadcast towers are in the same direction just 6 or so miles away, but looking online I saw that most of the highly rated antennas were well over $40. After work I went over to HomeDepot to get some F-connectors to run a new cable wire to maybe help things out and saw a little $8 rabbit ears/UHF loop and decided to give it a try. To my amazement, the little antenna picked up all of the major HD channels (ABC,CBS,NBC,FOX,PBS,CW) their sub-channels and some other random stations. Some of their signal strength readings were a little low so I ran a wire up into the attic along with the antenna. Now every tunable channel was pegged green for signal strength. I played around with Windows Media Center 7 and really like the interface. It is no Tivo, but way ahead of the cable DVR. I set up a bunch of our shows to record and had to play around with some of the power management to keep it from going to sleep. One of the nice features is that Media Center will record an extra three minutes of a show if it can, unlike the horrible TWC box which cuts off the endings. If I can ever get a CableCard adapter for the desktop, I will drop the horrible TWC box forever. 10:50 PM | Comments [0]