New to gbpvr

[Deusxmachina]

Now that I have had time to think about it. Let me ask this:

I currently have rabbit ears connected to a converter box and then into my HD TV.. I assume the signal I get from that isn't HD right? It still looks good enough for me so can I accomplish that level of video quality with a MediaMVP?

Eric

Various stuff, just tossing it out there:

If it's one of the government-coupon converter boxes, then it doesn't output HD. It is taking the HD (ATSC) signal out of the air and turning it into an SD signal. It still looks good, but it's not HD. The better boxes will output HD, but none of the government-coupon boxes will.

I'm guessing your HDTV is pretty old since it should have its own HD tuner in it otherwise.

Since you have an ATSC card in your computer, you can hook the PC straight to your HDTV if you want to watch HD. And then use MVPs on the other TVs. That's how I have mine. My old HDTV doesn't have a built-in HD tuner anyway, so I have that connected to the computer via component or DVI (either one works), and then an MVP hooked to my router for another TV.

I can watch HDTV (downconverted on-the-fly to SDTV) on my analog TV via the MVP. When the MVP has a problem, it's usually on 1080 mkv (h.264) files. Doesn't seem to mind the ATSC 1080i or 720p mpeg2 (Over-The-Air) files much. Others apparently aren't so lucky. It also plays .avi (divx/xvid) files fine, which are always SD. That's with a 2.8ghz Core2Duo.

...all that, but I'm at the computer a lot, so I often just watch TV on a second monitor anyway since the HTPC and my regular PC are networked together.

So you can watch HD no problem just hooking your HDTV straight to the PC. (Assuming the PC is powerful enough to play HD files, which it should be.) If you have MVP problems, or problems with any similar device, one thing to consider is to have the PC automatically convert the HD files into non-HD files. You won't be able to watch them right away on the non-HDTV, but it's something. A great thing about a DVR is never having to watch shows in real-time anyway.

Having said all that, yeah, the MVP is old now, and it wasn't designed for HDTV. It likes mpeg2 (OTA ATSC) HDTV better than h.264 HDTV, but it still wasn't designed for that and so can have problems with it.