I thought I'd share my experience with antenna and amplifier products so others can benefit from my research and experience. I live in a rural area with lots of trees and was having a problem picking up all of the OTA channels, and locking a strong signal. The result is choppy television viewing/recording, and sometimes no valid recording. Enter amplification.
I have the following antenna setup for OTA digital TV:
Config1 is $20 cheaper than Config2, but it takes more coax cables and therefore adds more to the cable mess, but works great connected to the HD HomeRun dual tuner. I need the signal amp because the dual tuner splits the signal which weakens the signal going to each tuner.
Config2 is $20 more expensive, but is very clean due to only having 1 coax cable and 1 USB cable (for power to amplify the signal).
I used painter tape to tape the 2 Leaf antennas to the wall behind my tv, and both tuner devices pick up all signals very well. The Leaf antenna definitely works very well and is inexpensive.
I'm trying to use the "LAV Video" decoder in NPVR.
If I select it for the "MPEG2" decoder in the settings it is used when I play back my .ts recordings (verified in GraphEdit) but I see no way to change the options for the decoder when I connect to the remote graph. Playback has problems in NPVR so I think I need to select the "Intel QuickSync" option but I see no way to get to the LAV Video decoder settings/options dialog?
If I select it for the "H.264" video decoder it never seems to be used for my MKV files with H.264 video. The "Microsoft DTV-DVD" decoder is always used even though I'm using the LAV Splitter. I also don't see any way to set the "VC-1" decoder in NPVR although maybe the LAV decoder doesn't support VC-1 anyways?
Has anyone attempted/considered/thought about making a mobile specific version of NEWA? I would like to use my iPhone to perform simple operations with NEWA, but the current web pages are too difficult to use effectively on the small screen. I saw there are some frameworks which make writing mobile web sites simple. This is one framework that works with iOS, Android, RIM, webOS, and more: http://www.iui-js.org/. I also wasn't sure if a framework like this or others would work properly with the current NEWA web server.
I have been using GBPVR / NPVR for the last 4 years with a dual tuner Compro DVB-T PCI-E card and for the last year and a bit a DVB-T2 dongle for Freeview HD, all with great success.
On the house we now live in there is a sky dish with dual feed to the living room and I would like to get a sat card for freesat + some of the free to air other channels - Phoenix for one.
Motherboard has 1 PCI-E socket (Compro Card) and 2 PCI sockets (Free)
Would you recommend Swapping the Compro DVB-T for a Dual TDS Sat card or just getting a single PCI TDS Sat card for now possibly going to two cards later.
If WMC can decrypt these channels, there must be a way to do it outside of the WMC? Either natively inside of NPVR which would be preferred, or maybe something crazy like having NPVR launch a recording through MCE and have it record, then afterwards runs something live WTV to AVI and strip the Encryption?
Kinda a convoluted approach, but I'd like to have a fully integrated system free of numerous hardware boxes if possible. Otherwise I'll have to attach a STB to the system and record in Analog to my PVR-500 Hauppauge card.
Anyone else have something to address Encrypted Content?
Is there a way to get the channel icons and Show Images to show up in the Clients? I have all of my Channel Icons and Show Images in the Server. Do they have to be physically present in the client also?
I just upgraded to the latest version of NPVR from the last version. Everything went well, almost. Everything functions fine if I use a mouse. If I use the remote control, I can't select any submenu folders. This only applies to the Video, Music, Pictures menu items because they are the only ones that have a submenu folder structure. Once you select the top level item, when it goes to the next level it jumps a specific number of folders and sits there. If you try to navigate off that folder, it just jumps around and goes right back to the same folder. This happens the same for all folders in question. I can navigate and select the folders with a keyboard. The logs indicate that the keystrokes from the remote are being processed as individual letters rather than a complete word representing the keystroke. I am using the Submenu plugin but have tried it without the plugin with the same results. Does anyone have any ideas?
Trying to do a bit of a tidyup of my htpc and see this is running in the services. Apart from the IR, is there any other parts of the wintv app I need? I seem to remember somewhere that it was needed for analogue capture? (Something I no longer do)
