Where Are All of the HDTV Tuners? 208
An anonymous reader asks: "Today I read about rabbit ears making a comeback with OTA HTDV. I want to purchase a standalone ATSC HDTV tuner to go with my projector, but I am having a very hard time finding one. The big-box stores seem to only stock one or two models and are frequently sold out. Searching online yields similar results. It would seem that there would be ever increasing demand for these tuners given that many HDTVs were sold without internal tuners in years past, and these tuners will be necessary for all old NTSC TVs after the February, 2009 shutdown of analog broadcasts. Where should I look to buy one of these devices? Of the currently available models, which are the best? Will the standalone HDTV tuner become a ubiquitous item as the 2009 deadline approaches?"
Samsung (Score:5, Informative)
I have an SIR-T165 and it works great. Tunes all analog cable, OTA analog and digital, plus OTA HDTV. Supports all formats. No broadcast flag, IEEE-1394/FireWire, DVI, VGA/RGB, S-Video, component, composite. Samsung did a really great job packing in a lot of connectors, formats, and functionality. The SIR-T451 appears to add QAM for digital cable (in the clear, no doubt), and HDCP on the DVI.
This doesn't answer the question about where they've all gone, but Samsung did a good job and hopefully you can pick one of these, or something like it, up somewhere.
Buy a Mac mini and an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid (Score:4, Informative)
rabbit ears are useless for HD (Score:5, Informative)
HD home run (ethernet with 2 tuners) (Score:5, Informative)
go read up. you need a pc (this isn't an end-user device that connects directly to a tv) but it DOES have atsc and clear-qam. meaning: off the air and also cable unencrypted.
seems to work, too. I love mine. 1 channel of HD takes 15% of a 10/100 ether. gig-e is not even close to needed, here, thankfully. (all the work is in PLAYBACK, not saving to disk, btw).
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
$180 (Score:3, Informative)
I like the LG 3510A (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The 2009 deadline.... (Score:2, Informative)
So it's not about HDTVs as much as everyone getting off their behinds to make it happen.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, I have no desire to get satellite or cable. There's no way I'm going to pay money to watch commercials.
Every Device Must Have One! (Score:5, Informative)
Xesdeeni
HDHomeRun (ethernet with 2 tuners) (Score:4, Informative)
Samsung TR451at circuit city (Score:3, Informative)
There are many more digital channels available in minneapolis than on NTSC (normal) broadcast. I get 7 PBS stations over the air digitally. I get a just for kids Qubo station. I get an all music video with no comercials station. I get 2 weather channels. Plus I get all the local channels in high def, digital perfection and a digital guide. Why would anyone view over the air on NTSC?
I view this on my beutiful Westinghouse 42' LCD at 1080i but I'm pretty sure my tuner would output to an old 480i CRT TV.
The Samsung TR451 works pretty well but I have a few quibbles. The guide takes a while to load the information when I press the guide button. The channels take longer to change than a regular TV.
Re:The 2009 deadline.... (Score:5, Informative)
It takes less bandwidth for digital cable than OTA, and having two hundred more shopping channels isn't exactly on consumer's must-have-now list.
10 years is a long time. Consumer HD devices have been out for quite some time, it's been the encoding that has kept the whole thing from going anywhere. Most of the problems with the roll out stem from the FCCs total lack of backbone in setting the standard (singular). Instead, we got a "whatever you guy want" spec that is a royal PITA to implement. And don't even think of arguing VSB or QAM. As a consumer, I don't give a shit which has more technical superiority in certain circumstances - I want it to work. The FCC should have mandated a single type of encoding. Period. We all agree that VHS was chosen over Betamax for user-friendliness over quality - but you get enough eggheads and technophiles in a room with the bean counters and you can pretty much just ask the consumer to drop trou and bend over.
Cheat Sheet (Score:5, Informative)
(From Wikipedia) The FCC has issued the following mandates for devices entering the US:
* By July 1, 2005 all televisions with screen sizes over 36" must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner
* By March 1, 2006 all televisions with screen sizes over 25" must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner
* By March 1, 2007 all televisions regardless of screen size, and all interface devices which include a tuner (VCR, DVD player/recorder, DVR) must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner
That's 3 days from now, AND includes things like TV tuner cards, which explains why companies like Hauppauge just released a "budget" dual NTSC/ATSC line, the HVR-950/1600.
* A Congressional bill has authorized subsidizing converter boxes that would allow people to receive the new digital broadcasts on their old TVs. The current plan is to make two $40 coupons available from January 1, 2008 through March 31, 2009 for each household that relies exclusively on over-the-air television reception.
* In the United States, the switch-off of all analog terrestrial TV broadcasts has been mandated for no later than February 17, 2009. Legislation setting this deadline was signed into law in early 2006. Currently, most U.S. broadcasters are beaming their signals in both analog and digital formats; a few are digital-only.
So, expect to see ATSC tuners become more plentiful in early 2008, once the subsidies start rolling in.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Samsung SIR-TS160 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The 2009 deadline.... (Score:4, Informative)
US cable systems also use 6 MHz channels, so 8-VSB would certainly work over cable too. But it would waste cable capacity because the cable channel is so much cleaner than the broadcast channel. 256-QAM, popular on US cable systems, provides about 38 Mb/s per 6 MHz channel, about twice that of 8-VSB in the same bandwidth. This signal is necessarily more 'fragile' than 8-VSB, but it works fine on a well-engineered hybrid fiber/coax system.
Perhaps you meant to compare 8-VSB to DVB/OFDM, the over-the-air scheme used in Europe and other countries? This is where the debate has raged. OFDM, with its built-in multipath resistance, had a definite advantage over 8-VSB in early implementations. But as the receive equalizers in 8-VSB improved, it has become at least the equal of OFDM according to the on-air tests I've seen. Both work.
Many digital TVs sold in the support both ATSC 8-VSB and QAM signals. 8-VSB is obviously needed for over-the-air reception, but you can't necessarily receive digital TV from your cable system even if you have a QAM tuner. My experience with Time Warner Cable is that all of the digital TV channels are encrypted except for the minority taken from local TV broadcast stations. In other words, with just a QAM tuner in your set you can't get anything from cable that you can't get from an antenna. This makes the QAM tuner much less useful than it could be.
Some (but not many) digital TVs have slots for a "CableCard". You rent this from your local cable company, and it decrypts the remaining digital channels for you (or at least the ones to which you have subscribed). Besides not being available yet on most digital TVs, current CableCards are unable to handle two-way services such as video-on-demand and pay-per-view, so it's just not very useful yet. That means you might as well rent a digital tuner box from your cable company and plug it into your TV set with HDMI so that you don't use the TV's QAM tuner at all.