HDTV Without the Cash Drain

Sometimes the stars are in perfect alignment. Sometimes it’s just dumb luck.

After a lot of work and help, we had turned our home office computer into a home entertainment system complete with a NAS and wireless network. Everyone had their choice of music in their rooms. Everyone could go on line and the kids had developed a great list of parent approved IPTV shows.

We were now ready to update our huge projection TV to a sleek 42-inch flat screen complete with brilliant images and surround sound. Our choice was an eye-popping screen that looked great in the showroom. For some reason the viewing seemed a lot different when it was installed in our family room.

When we asked the technician for a reason, he explained that the set was only HDTV ready. That meant for maximum enjoyment we would need to add the special HDTV tuner which he would be happy to install after we purchased it. Or we could buy one from the cable company at a lower cost and then pay more for the HD service.

He also recommended a TiVo box so we could time-shift our shows or save those we couldn’t watch during the week for the weekend when we had a little more time. The wife mentioned it would be nice if she could capture all of her favorites (home improvement shows wasn’t on our must watch list!). Our children also had shows they wanted to watch on the systems in their rooms (we’ve never been MTV and Buffy fans).

It quickly became obvious that the initial cost of the boxes plus the forever cable charges were going to take a toll on our budget so we looked for an alternative.

The first thing we learned is that the 15 plus stations in our area all broadcast their shows in high definition not just over the cable but also from one of three towers.

After some additional research we found that there are more than 1600 TV stations across the country that broadcast their content in HDTV. More than 71% of the U.S households have eight or more HDTV broadcast stations. In fact, over-the-air HDTV broadcasts reach 93% of the homes.

Content wasn’t the problem.

The problem was capturing the signals and showing them on the TVs around the house. Or capturing the shows when they were broadcast and saving them for later viewing.

On one of our visits to the local big box PC/CE store we came across a section of TV add-in cards that had the features we were looking for including PVR capabilities. We chose the ADS Tech HDTV PCI card which had all of the features we wanted including electronic program guide (EPG) software. The software would make it possible for us to schedule TV recordings in advance simply by highlighting the show by title and keyword. We could even schedule recordings over the Internet from the office.

The ADS HDTV card includes full PVR capabilities just like you would have when paying a monthly subscription to your cable or satellite provider. The only difference is that you never pay a subscription fee! The card and software bundle cost us $129. Compared with the cost of the other boxes and monthly fees it was a great bargain.

The PVR software allows you to pause live TV, schedule recordings via the EPG so you can schedule recordings in advance. Then you can watch the recorded shows at a later time and even output them in crystal clear high-def quality to a standard DVD disk for viewing on your present DVD player. The card also delivers Dolby 5.1 surround audio.

Since we have analog cable TV service, the ADS card includes a tuner that will receive both analog and digital signals and switches instantly between the two. The EPG also displays both HDTV channels and regular programming, giving us complete TV viewing flexibility across all channels.

As with most PCs today, our system already includes digital video interface (DVI) connectors that will allowed us to connect the PC to the new HDTV monitor in the family room. This also enabled us to use the PC and ADS HDTV card as our primary over-the-air receiver for capturing any and all shows anyone in the household wanted to capture/enjoy.

Installation of the ADS HDTV card was very straightforward. Remove the case to our Windows XP Media Center system, seat the card into the slot next to our fairly generic sound card and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video card (documentation says it also works with the ATI Radeon 9550 and above). The system already had plenty of RAM, 1GB, as well as HD capacity (we had just upgraded to 250 GB internal HD) so with our 500GB NAS unit we had storage to spare.

According to the literature, one hour of HD content consumes about 10GB of HD capacity and 12 hours of content will require about 108 GB so we feel by balancing most current shows with “later” archived shows we should have sufficient storage capacity. Many of the archived shows will be written directly to DVDR discs so they can be viewed much later or even taken on long trips and played in the SUV’s DVD player.

After installing the HDTV PCI drivers and ensuring our antenna would capture the HD signal (www.checkhd.com), we configured Beyond TV to work with our system. Using the software wizard, set up was straight forward and took about 10 minutes to complete.

Using the IR remote control that is included with the card, you can go through the program guide, select your HD (there is an HD icon that highlights the programs that are broadcast in HD) and analog channels, select the shows you want to watch immediately or that you want to record for later viewing .

The full featured PVR software allows us to see what’s on and watch it in real time or schedule shows for future recording. The digital TV capabilities also allow us to pause, fast forward and rewind live shows as well as recorded programs. The software even includes a SmartSkip feature which allows us to skip through TV commercials. It also includes a ShowSqueeze feature which compresses the show to save disk space.

In no time at all, we had added HDTV capabilities to our primary media center PC. We could watch shows in brilliant high definition on the large HDTV ready monitor in the living room and the kids could tune in their shows or watch shows that had been recorded earlier.

Since they multi-task naturally, we often find the kids in their rooms IMing friends, watching a show in a window on their monitor, listening to IP radio and doing school work. Sometimes they scare us.

But the ADS HDTV card and bundled software gave us all the high definition television we wanted at a fraction of the cost of the HDTV tuner add-on, TiVo box and monthly subscription fees.

by – Andy Marken