perfidy

I refuse to believe that I get $75 worth of "programming" on DirecTV each month. It's crap, I tell ya. Crap! So I get it into my head the past few days that I'm going to see what my alternatives are. I've noticed that the quality of shows on the "cable channels" has dropped, on a scale of 1 to 10 to around 1.5 or so. Getcher double-indian head collector's coin pressing here! I've also noticed that the only shows I enjoy watching are on the networks (stoopid shows like Surface and Invasion, which I like -- screw you).

It turns out that in the Washington DC area we're quite fortunate to be living in one of the best Newfangled Digital TV centers around. We get quite a long list of channels (and sub-channels) -- 2,4,5,7,9,11,13,20,43,45,50. Some of the channels are from Baltimore, but come in just fine. But how to get all this free digital goodness, given the need for the contained black magic of an ATSC tuner, which is not the same as your father's NTSC tuner?

You've got a couple of options for high def TV. You can go with cable and get four or five locals in HD, paying about $80 a month, if you're lucky. You can go with DirecTV, pay $200 for your equipment and installation, then discover that what you're actually doing is getting the HD channels over the air. You can go with Dish and be in the same situation as DirecTV, although it's a bit cheaper overall. I'll also say that DirecTV really pissed me off two weeks ago. The new mpeg-4 compatible HD receivers arrived at Best Buy. These new receivers can use a 5-LNB dish to receive current and some future programming from DirecTV, which will include very shortly the local channels from this area in high def; they also have an ATSC OTA (digital over-the-air) tuner built-in. I picked one up for $200 and brought it home, then called DirecTV to inform them of the equipment change. The customer support person informed me that they couldn't activate the receiver unless I agreed to a 2-year commitment. Since I had just gone out and bought the receiver myself, I asked exactly what I was getting in return for the two year commitment. Dedicated phone person told me "Nothing!". That just didn't seem fair to me. I told her I was going to return the equipment and possibly cancel my service. "I'm sorry about that!" was her chirpy response. Ridiculous -- I've changed equipment before and not had a problem.

I guess I could have accepted the commitment. But you can also say "Screw the Man" to yourself, and see if there's a way to cut them out entirely. The catch, as always, is that your significant other really likes Tivo, and you'll die a terrible death if said "Now Playing" list goes missing.
Because of the waffling at the federal government level over the "broadcast flag" (which would make it illegal for an electronic device to make a copy of information that was so-flagged) there's been almost a complete lack of investment by companies in developing convergence hardware. Convergence in the media equipment realm is the notion that a single, fast general purpose computer can do it all -- it can play music, record television, show DVDs, interact with the internet...you name it. With the federal government repeatedly on the verge of declaring general computing to be illegal, companies don't spend money developing products that might be legislated out of existence.

Tivo is a kind of convergence box (lightweight), and there are others on the horizon. But your garden-variety (or slightly above garden-variety) PC has far more horsepower and far more capability than those consumer boxes do. Shouldn't it be able to do the job?

If you want Tivo-like capability for over-the-air without cable or satellite, your choices are minimal. Sony has an OTA tuner/hard drive recorder combination that sells for $500 for the base model. It can do the job. If you go the PC route, you can use a couple of different packages. The free Linux alternative is MythTV. I haven't set one up yet but I am going to give it a try. The limiter here is that very few TV tuner cards have Linux drivers. Apple has their new G5 system, where a media center TV function is built in. As far as I know it does not yet support HDTV. Microsoft has the Windows Media Center Edition, which as of the latest service packs supports HDTV. It's a somewhat expensive proposition to buy a media center PC at this time -- the cheapest you can get one is around $750. You'd need to add your own tuner card to that as well.

I ended up buying an ADS Technologies Instant HDTV PCI card and a Terk outdoor antenna. I had an older PC setup (AMD64, 200GB HD) that I wanted to start with. I could have gone the Linux route, but the capture card situation just didn't seem to be all that great. There are some significant financial advantages, though --

Linux -- free O/S, free TV software (MythTV), but you need to find the right capture card with Linux drivers, which is tough.

Windows -- XP Home ($90), decent software costs ($50 or so), good card and driver support. Total cost is about $300, assuming you already have decent hardware to run on. If you have hardware that has XP already, deduct that. I moved my XP installation to my new computer, so it was not available for the old one. You can run XP in trial mode for 30 days, though, which allows you to evaluate the quality of your eventual solution. If you like it, then buy the OS and you're good (one quick note -- an unauthenticated XP will not download certain patches. Use your activated XP machine to retrieve them, then copy them over to the test machine).

For Windows, the Instant HDTV comes with BeyondTV Express, a somewhat limited TV-watching program. BeyondTV offers an upgrade to their latest full version for $50. Alternatives include SageTV, which seemed to be a bit cruder and not speak HDTV quite as well. What I was surprised by was my discovery of Meedio -- a visual stunner that aims to be the true convergence app for PC hardware. Sadly, Meedio does not yet support the Instant HDTV card so I could not test its TV functionality. What I was amazed by was the clean UI, extensibility, and general polish of Meedio -- the way that Meedio looks, the way that you use it...it is very much what I thought a good convergence app ought to be like.

There are some instructions on the Meedio web site indicating how to configure an unsupported capture card, so I guess I'll try that next and see if Meedio does a good job with high def. If so, it'll probably be the best choice. I can't really say that I was looking forward to messing around with MythTV all that much. I can get an OEM Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition for about $120 at a DIY shop around here, and I think it would be a good thing to have regardless.

There have been a few "weird" bits -- I had the system record "Surface" last night, and the encoding seemed to be messed up. I got an SD picture instead of SD -- considerably better than DirecTV's garbage, but far from HDTV. Each station's transmission is delivered in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream form, which can encode multiple channels of information. It can contain an SD program, an HD program, and additional channels (like weather). Part of what a TV app needs to do is select out the right subchannel and display that. The good news is that the raw data is still captured on my system, so I'll be able to experiment with it and find out if the HD content is really there, or if it's just plain missing!

I can't say that I'm ready to say "screw you" to the cable man just yet, but I'm getting close. I am hard pressed to name a channel other than SciFi that has any programming I am interested in -- and even there there's just one show (Battlestar Galactica, you nerd) that I actually want to watch.