Guest Bumnut Posted May 10, 2008 Posted May 10, 2008 (edited) G'day. I've put together a little HTPC. It's a Pentium4 2.8, 768MB RAM, 320GB HD. It's on an MSI mATX board with 1 agp slot and 3 pci. I've got a video card in the AGP slot, a wifi card in the top PCI, and two Leadtek DTV1000S cards in the bottom two. I'm using mediaportal under XP SP2. The reception is sometimes adequate, sometimes not. Using the exact same setup of leads into an el-cheapo set top box, I get perfect reception (I'm in Yamba in far north NSW, getting the Lismore braodcast) Is there something I'm missing? Why is the reception so much worse with a TV card than with a STB? Edited May 10, 2008 by Bumnut
mtv Posted May 10, 2008 Posted May 10, 2008 STB's use different circuitry to card-type tuners. Some card-type tuners work better than others, however, they ALL require very strong 'high-quality' digital dignals to operate reliably. Often STB's will work ok with marginal signals... From what you describe, it sounds like you have insufficient 'quality' signals to provide reliable reception, which is usually an antenna/splitting/cabling issue. What antenna are you using?
Guest Bumnut Posted May 10, 2008 Posted May 10, 2008 On the roof is a big square UHF antenna and an old VHF antenna, both going into a masthead amp. the cable is pretty good, gives a very clear picture on analog, and goes into a Y splitter cable just before the two cards. I'm annoyed. Is there anything I can do? Does the arrangement of all the cards close together matter?
OzRob Posted May 12, 2008 Posted May 12, 2008 Some card-type tuners work better than others, however, they ALL require very strong 'high-quality' digital dignals to operate reliably.Often STB's will work ok with marginal signals... I live in a marginal reception area and don't find this to be true at all. I have a Topfield PVRt5000, a DigiCrystal 9000 and a DSE SD settop box, as well as my main HTPC, which has a DNTV Live! Dual Hybrid S2 card. Both ABC and Nine channels suffer from occasional stuttering due to marginal signal strength. My antenna installer wasn't able to completely eliminate this - even after trialling a number of different antenna options - because I live under an escarpment with limited sight to any available broadcast towers. Of all of the tuners I have access to, the HTPC does the best job of capturing the signal. Often when I get frequent pixelation on ABC on my Topfield (in the family room), I can move to the lounge room and watch the HTPC with less program interruptions. HTPCs CAN be more problematic with reception if they are, for example, in plastic rather than metal cases or if there are WiFi cards installed. But the quality of HTPC tuner cards in general is in my experience pretty similar to the quality range of tuners in dedicated PVRs and settop boxes. To the OP, how is this problem with reception on your HTPC manifest? Is it occasional 'jerkiness' of the video, regular 'jerkiness' of the video, compete dropout of signal, etc. It is possible that it is not reception that is the problem, but excessive CPU usage, a problem with the video card or drivers, or something else entirely.
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