Picking a Decent (HD) Receiver

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Robizzle01

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2005
Messages
159
I just spent the last hour looking for information and got nowhere. So i'm sorry if this has already been covered in the forums or if there is a plethora of information about this online, but I was unable to find anything useful.

Since I have a Westinghouse 37w1 capable of 1080p, I figured I would take advantage of that and get a HD receiver. I am on a budget, however, so if all of the good ones are going to cost much over $100, I guess i'd rather go with standard def for the next few years.

Anyways, which receivers would you all suggest? I basicly just want some way to watch cable tv on this "computer monitor." I have no desire for over the air tv and don't want to spend money on any of those latest and greatest features that seem to double the price.
 
Robizzle01 said:
I basicly just want some way to watch cable tv on this "computer monitor." I have no desire for over the air tv and don't want to spend money on any of those latest and greatest features that seem to double the price.
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Why dont yo have an HD cable box from the cable company?
 
why not OTA? OTA is the best quality HD feed you'll get and well its free!!!

Walmart has a really nice priced OTA tuner box USA something, forgot what price it is though.

Also if you go on Ebay you can find many old VOOM box's that still have really good OTA tuners built into those box's and will work great.

this is a little more expensive than $100:
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-BWpImshBokw/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?g=193550&I=305SIRT451

again you might be able to fine a used OTA hd tuner cheaper on ebay.

But as already stated you can easily get an HD cable box or HD satalite box depending on your service for next to nothing.

I have comcast and you can get their HD box (non-DVR) for the same price ($5/month) as you'd pay for their regular cable box.

I know direct tv you can get their HD box (non-DVR) for free after rebate right now too.

- Josh
 
The reason I dont have one from my provider (Comcast) is that i'm in a college dorm and the tv we get is included with housing. Actually, I dont even know if there is hd signal in the cable that I could tune in to or if that would be an extra fee. I was hoping that I could pick off some hd programming that was floating around the walls.

I may be able to call comcast and get a box from them but that seems like a hassle ... then again, if its only something like $5/mo it would be better than buying something. Do the boxes comcast provide ever include over the air support also?

As for why I don't get an over the air tuner, the first reason is the lack of channels. Most all of the programming I watch is on cable-only tv. Another reason is the price, from what I saw all of the tuners were upwards of $150.
 
Robizzle01 said:
The reason I dont have one from my provider (Comcast) is that i'm in a college dorm and the tv we get is included with housing. Actually, I dont even know if there is hd signal in the cable that I could tune in to or if that would be an extra fee. I was hoping that I could pick off some hd programming that was floating around the walls.
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"floating around the walls" thats a new one to me. hehe. With that aside I think your talking about OTA (over (off) the air) meaning free broadcasting.

Which is definately avialable depending on how far you are from the broadcasting atennan's and how the dorms are built.

check out www.antennaweb.org

do you have a HTPC built connected to your tv now? if not how do you watch any tv with the display? If you do have a HTPC connected just get a OTA HD tuner card.

If not and you want to do just OTA HD then either browse ebay and try and find an old VOOM box or find a OTA reciver box off ebay that might be your best bet.

I may be able to call comcast and get a box from them but that seems like a hassle ... then again, if its only something like $5/mo it would be better than buying something. Do the boxes comcast provide ever include over the air support also?
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No, none of the box's you get with comcast or any cable providor has a OTA hd tuner built into them, that would defeate the purpose of paying for HD feeds on their service.

however you can get most of the OTA hd channels from the cable company.

As for why I don't get an over the air tuner, the first reason is the lack of channels. Most all of the programming I watch is on cable-only tv. Another reason is the price, from what I saw all of the tuners were upwards of $150.
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I think your confusing OTA and cable HD. When you say floating through teh walls, that is OTA hd, which is seperate from cable HD.

Cable HD gets you things like HBO HD, cinemax HD, EPSN(2) HD, Discovery Theater HD, ect....

OTA gets you all your local channels, NBC, ABC, Fox, and CBS all in HD.

OTA is free, cable HD is not. Granted with comcast the only thing you really need to do to get their HD package is just by upgrading your service to their expanded digital which will get you, EPSN(2) HD, Discovery HD, TNT HD, IN HD, and Musictv HD along with the local ota HD channels but off of the cable (comcast re-broadcasts the local channels in hd on their service)

make more sense now?

- Josh
 
Sorry I didn't mean to confuse anyone. The terms I used were at best compleatly wrong. All I meant by floating through the walls was actually referring to all the wiring throughout the building. Despite how I presented my knowledge, I actuall am quite technologically adept.

Anyways, I understand fully the differences between signals that are digitalized and broadcast over the air and those that are offered through the coaxial cables from various service providers. The reason I choose to use this silly term "floating through the walls" was to mean maybe neighbors of mine have subscribed to these channels that you normally have to pay more for, however, comcast due to incompetence, has not secured them to prevent anyone and everyone from accesing them. I know my ex-girlfriend's parents get tons of HD and pay per view channels from their neighbors. I'm not talking about diliberatly stealing cable, but instead using cable which is for whatever reason, accidently delivered to your house/room. I choose this term because of the fuzzy legal issues that might surround watching HD channels that you are not paying for. Not stealing either, but only getting due to the cable companies fault.

I can see the argument that cable providers wouldn't provide rentals of HD Receivers capable of both OTA and coaxial since some channels would overlap, however, it was worth asking about. It seems unlikely but possible since cable providers offer so many more channels than are available OTA I would doubt that they would be threatened by allowing free reception of the few that are available.

As for why I don't just buy an OTA HDTV receiver for my HTPC: I have had many problems with my HTPC not being able to playback recordings at a respectable framerate. Since I use my HTPC for many other linux related tasks, I would like very much to not have to make any major changes -- everything except mythtv is running great.

I'm running MythTV on Gentoo 64 and my framerate is horrible for anything higher than 800x600. This is on an AMD 64 3000+ with an ATI 9500 and working 3d acceleration and opengl. One interesting point is that I have no problem playing back 1080 movies using mplayer. The problem is only within mythtv. I like to use the computer as a web server, samba server, mysql database server in addition to using it for all software development that I do. I have no idea why mythtv doesn't run at a respectable framerate. Anyways, as much as I hate to do this, I may end up installing Windows ME if I can't get mythtv to run the way it should. I'll try some last resorts like fedora core, ubuntu and knoppmyth before it comes to that though.

From this discussion so far, its looking like my best option is to get my htpc working the way it should and not even both with a receiver. I'm still a little stumped as to why no distributions offer mythtv without any huge walkthroughs. Of all the ones i've tried (other than KnoppMyth,) Gentoo has been the easiest.
 
I don't think you can just pick up any ole scientific atlanta box on ebay and expect it to work since the card needs to be initialized by the cable company. I'm probably wrong but this is what i've been led to believe. There's a ton of information out there btw, just get creative with your google search terms and be patient with your searches, and i'm sure you'll either find the right forum, or answer.
 
You might be able to get a QAM based tuner card, IE something like MyHd 130 or the Fusion cards. They might be able to pick up any none C5 flagged channels, which are basically the local channels in HD.

Most if not everything else on comcast is C5 flagged and only a comcast cable box can pick up the flagged channels.

So either get a comcast box or try a QAM tuner.

- Josh
 
Here's a question that I feel would help the progression of this topic: What do you want to watch in HD?
 
If you're in a dorm, find out if your college/uni offers digital cable. If they don't, your only options are: 1) OTA (antenna) and 2) installing a directv/sat tv system. I would normally assume that the second option would be ruled out, but if you're in a dorm room watching a westy 37" monitor, perhaps you've got that kind of scratch.
 
mastercheeze said:
I would normally assume that the second option would be ruled out, but if you're in a dorm room watching a westy 37" monitor, perhaps you've got that kind of scratch.
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i would say that he, his parents or he is smart enough to write a program to caputre the signal and put it to the 37" westy
 
mrslinky said:
i would say that he, his parents or he is smart enough to write a program to caputre the signal and put it to the 37" westy
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Eh? That just made no sense at all.

He was just refffering to the fact that if he has the kind of money to run a 37" westy he might have the kind of money to do the other options mentioned.

as far as being "smart" enough to write an app? where the hell did that come from? I'd assume if he was he'd either have gotten Mythtv to work properly or wouldn't be posting questions in this forum in teh first place don't you think?

- Josh
 
Well I don't know about either of the conclusions the last two have drawn.

I probably am 'smart' enough to write some software to capture the signal and put it out to my tv, however, I don't have the time to bother with all that -- especially when such software already exists that I can purchase much more easily.

As for the money, I'm not particularly well off, I just choose to spend my money on different things than most people and I work hard during the summer and school year. Combine that with shopping around and the power of ebay, and I had a 37" westinghouse in no time.

As for the suggestions others have offered, I appreciate the help. I should have known that there would be no simple solution to my problem that is under $100ish but for some reason I was convinced that there had to be some sort of universial coaxial reciever somewhere that could pick out the hd channels from the cable I already have from comcast. I wasn't expecting to get all the channels in HD but it seemed logical that comcast might offer a few in HD even under the basic package (perhaps to entice customers to buy more channels in HD.)
 
UMDivX said:
You might be able to get a QAM based tuner card, IE something like MyHd 130 or the Fusion cards. They might be able to pick up any none C5 flagged channels, which are basically the local channels in HD.

Most if not everything else on comcast is C5 flagged and only a comcast cable box can pick up the flagged channels.

So either get a comcast box or try a QAM tuner.

- Josh
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Refer back to this post, another option is the LG QAM Tuner but it has been discontinued and you may have a hard time finding it. Geeks.com

Edit: forgot about the cablecard tivo 3, that should let you pick up unflagged channels as well and you can always pick up a cablecard from comcast to get all your channels.
 
ND40oz said:
Refer back to this post, another option is the LG QAM Tuner but it has been discontinued and you may have a hard time finding it. Geeks.com

Edit: forgot about the cablecard tivo 3, that should let you pick up unflagged channels as well and you can always pick up a cablecard from comcast to get all your channels.
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yes but from what the OP said
however, so if all of the good ones are going to cost much over $100, I guess i'd rather go with standard def for the next few years.
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Series 3 costs $800 plus $13/month subsription fees.

- Josh
 
Robizzle01 said:
..... I wasn't expecting to get all the channels in HD but it seemed logical that comcast might offer a few in HD even under the basic package (perhaps to entice customers to buy more channels in HD.)
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yea its called being able to get the local OTA HD channels from comcast. Honestly comcasts HD lineup sucks, other than re-broadcasting OTA HD channels, they have 4 movie channels in HD, two epsn, discoveryhd, tnt hd, inhd, and mtv hd and thats it. Nothing too spectacular in my opinon. Thats why I stick with my htpc and do OTA.

- Josh
 
UMDivX said:
yea its called being able to get the local OTA HD channels from comcast. Honestly comcasts HD lineup sucks, other than re-broadcasting OTA HD channels, they have 4 movie channels in HD, two epsn, discoveryhd, tnt hd, inhd, and mtv hd and thats it. Nothing too spectacular in my opinon. Thats why I stick with my htpc and do OTA.

- Josh
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not only that but some of the HD movies are compressed and can look really shitty. Some of their stations just look like crap, not only on the larger screens, but also on the smaller screen. It's really disappointing to get an HDtv only to get super crapola picture quality from comcast.
 
bobbydole said:
not only that but some of the HD movies are compressed and can look really shitty. Some of their stations just look like crap, not only on the larger screens, but also on the smaller screen. It's really disappointing to get an HDtv only to get super crapola picture quality from comcast.
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See thats weird as I have no issues with HD on comcast at all, I have a couple neihbors who have Directtv and their stuff looks like shit.

Comcast actually does a great job with HD where I am, the only thing I can think of is that comcast hasn't fully upgraded your infrastructure where your at or something, but comcast is better than directtv from what i've seen so far.

- Josh
 
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