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198.151.12.8
I know most people here will have satellite or cable...but I've never been all that interested. Concerned about the upcoming loss of my old analog TV signal, I got a Zenith digital converter box, as discussed a little below. Price after $40 coupon was $25.
Initial experience was awful. I plugged in the box and at least half the channels were gone. Analog signals that were weak were noisy and snowy. Digital signals that were weak were just a black screen with a No Signal indicator.
After a week of antenna games (I have rabbit ears upstairs, a long coax coming down), it was still impossible to get all channels reliably. So with no great expectations, I tried getting a Philips amplified antenna. Unpacking carefully, so that I could take it back as necessary, I replaced the upstairs rabbit ears with new amplified rabbit ears. It worked. The higher I set the amplification, the better it worked. I set it to the full 50 dB. After tweaking location and orientation, I got all the OTA stations in LA. It's proven to be reliable. Three stations can still get flaky sometimes, depending on atmosphere I guess. But most of the time, they are all there.
YMMV. An indoor antenna setup is totally site specific. I think amplification worked for me because I have to drive a long coax. The antenna was only $32, so no big risk before hassling with an outdoor antenna.
Against all my expectations, I am loving digital TV. I thought it was some scam to give the public low quality signals, similar to satellite radio. But the picture is clearly superior (pun intended) to my old analog signal. Without snow or ghosts, every station looks now the way only 1 station looked on analog, clean and clear. The most telling indicator is that I have not been tempted once to return to analog.
The big loss in this transition has been programmability in my VCR. It is an analog tuner, of course, so I can no longer set timer and station and have it pick up shows when I'm gone. I can leave the converter box on a station and have the VCR record at a given time, but this is a poor substitute for the full programmability.
It is obvious that I will eventually need to get a video recorder (probably DVD) that has a digital tuner, so that I can re-establish the ability to program recording. Other than that, digital TV has been good.
Follow Ups:
Hi there
> The big loss in this transition has been programmability in my VCR.
It's not quite available yet, but the Dish DTVPal / Echostar TR-40 should allow you to record converted OTA digital broadcasts with a VCR. The TR-40 converter is supposed to have several (8?) programmable times and channels for VCR recordings. Of course you'll also have to program the VCR to record the connection from the TR-40 (line inputs or channel 3 or 4).
Regards
It has an internal tuner, it's HD-capable and it allows you to pause and rewind live TV. Of course, its real value is unlocked by signing up for Tivo service.
I had serious problems after the first year I owned the Series 3 but Tivo sent me a replacement and it has performed flawlessly (so far). I can recommend it.
-------------Call it, friendo.
I'm not at all interested in signing up for monthly service, but if I don't need to do that, I could get this kind of DVR.
I don't have HD, but may pretty soon (I'm getting good OTA HD signals now)- and at that point recording HD would become important, something the normal DVD recorder does not do.
I'm not sure how to get permanent copies saved from a DVR, it is probably not that easy, so the DVD recorder might be nice to have anyway.
But Tivo gives you free service for the first couple weeks and it becomes so convenient you can't live without it. When the grace period ends, even features like one-touch record are wiped out and you lose a lot of functionality. I was too spoiled by the service to give it up, so I signed up for three years (if you opt for paying for two years up front, you get a free year) and it came to an average of under $9 a month. I had just cancelled my DirecTV service at $50/month, so I was still saving more than $40 every month.
I think there is a way to record to your computer hard drive if you have the Tivo hooked up to a network router. From there, you can burn to DVD. Or you can just save shows you like on your Tivo hard drive. Since you don't watch HD content, you could save over 200 hours worth of content on the Tivo Series 3. Really a nice machine, as long as it's working.
-------------Call it, friendo.
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