free HD terrestrial TV
Posted by: Phil Sparks on 15 June 2006
been experimenting with getting High Def terrestrial TV using my pc. It is possible but there are a few provisos:
- main one is that you have to live within the London area, preferably as near as poss to Crystal Pallace. Freeview are running a one year trial of High Def. The good news is that the world cup footy and wimbledon tennis are being shown. The beeb have given out about 400 set top boxes for a small scale trial and aren't giving out any more, however it's possitble for anyone in the area to pick up the signal. The signal is quite low powered so you need a good view of Crystal Pallace and a decent aerial
- the only way at the mo that it's seems to be faesible to view the signals is using a digital TV card in your pc. The High Def stuff is being broadcast using mpeg 4 in a variant called H.264 so a normal STB won't do it.
- digi TV cards can be had for £50 or so or the one I have is from a UK company called Nebula and costs £100 with software that will control it and will decode H.264
- the big issue for me is that to view high def live TV you need a really stonking PC with a whizzy graphics card too. A few people on the forums have got a working live TV set like this. My P4 3GHZ with ATI 9600 card only gives me 15 or so fps rather than the 25 required. However, outputting the PC to the video projector on still or slow moving shots the quality is superb. definitely good enough to have me trawling the PC sites for upgrades to get more out of my PC
lots of info at the digitalspy forum
Phil
- main one is that you have to live within the London area, preferably as near as poss to Crystal Pallace. Freeview are running a one year trial of High Def. The good news is that the world cup footy and wimbledon tennis are being shown. The beeb have given out about 400 set top boxes for a small scale trial and aren't giving out any more, however it's possitble for anyone in the area to pick up the signal. The signal is quite low powered so you need a good view of Crystal Pallace and a decent aerial
- the only way at the mo that it's seems to be faesible to view the signals is using a digital TV card in your pc. The High Def stuff is being broadcast using mpeg 4 in a variant called H.264 so a normal STB won't do it.
- digi TV cards can be had for £50 or so or the one I have is from a UK company called Nebula and costs £100 with software that will control it and will decode H.264
- the big issue for me is that to view high def live TV you need a really stonking PC with a whizzy graphics card too. A few people on the forums have got a working live TV set like this. My P4 3GHZ with ATI 9600 card only gives me 15 or so fps rather than the 25 required. However, outputting the PC to the video projector on still or slow moving shots the quality is superb. definitely good enough to have me trawling the PC sites for upgrades to get more out of my PC
lots of info at the digitalspy forum
Phil