Home Theater HD Project

The Philips Mant950 HD antenna I'm using has wings that are screwed in place to create a bar type antenna. This can be wall mounted for indoor use or connected to a pole (mounting brackets included) for outdoor use. I'm using the pole approach (I ended up using an extra central vacuum tube). I mounted this in landscaping angled in the correct direction and buried the cables in the landscaping to the side of the house.

Home Theater HD Project

I've moved the Philips antenna outside and changed the orientation to the correct position. I now have good signal on all broadcast channels! I've also installed a full copy of Beyond TV using the DVICO as the video source. I've also created a shortcut using the full beyond TV app including the /networkclient:IP parameter which allows me access to the DVR recorded shows and live analog channels.

Things are starting to come together. Soccer in HD is amazing :)

Home Theater HD Project

I quickly attached the Philips antenna last night to see if it would boost the signal strength. It was actually worse than the indoor antenna! Based on the following map my antenna placement may need to change. This map was generated at
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/Welcome.aspx. The next step is to try this outside and orientate the antenna in the correct direction.

I'm also planning on installing a full copy of Beyond TV 4.3 to see how it works with this configuration.

I was able to watch several channels in HD last night but run into an issue with 5.1 surround sound stuttering. If I move back to mono things are fine.

The ATI Radeon video driver update was a success! The DVICO Fusion product is now displaying HDTV over the air video content and the audio is being presented in 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Making progress :)

The next steps are:

• Purchase cable molding in order to hide the coax cabling which will need to be snaked through the window well outside. The molding will hide the cable from the entertainment area where the HTPC is located. This will need to be installed asap.
• Purchase a new outside HDTV antenna with multi gain support. This will bring in the additional local affiliates as several of the channels are coming in with low signal strength.
• Check to see is I can install both a local copy of the full Beyond TV package and the Beyond Link application. This will allow me to use Beyond TV for local HD and Beyond Link for analog TV as needed from the DVR.

Home Theater HD Project

Ahhh, I guess I knew this wouldn't be as straight forward as I hoped! Here are the results from the weekend:

• The install of the DVICO USB product on the DVR system completed with no issues. I installed the Fusion HDTV product and was able to obtain a signal and was able to display HD content OTA. Success!
• Installed the 4.3 Beyond TV upgrade and configured the two video/audio sources (DVICO and 250 card). The 250 installed fine but I wasn't able to get anything out of the USB device.
• Decided that the issue with Beyond TV was probably a conflict with the overlay with something so I reformatted the 250 gig drive and reinstalled Windows XP, patched it, installed device drivers, installed the Fusion product, and then installed a clean copy of Beyond TV 4.3.
• The video coming out of 4.3 was not clean like in the Fusion product. At this point I decided to try upgrading the Beyond Link product on the HTPC to see what the over the network performance would be like. Not good. Major stuttering when attempting to bring HD content over the 100meg wired connection. Probably need gig speeds for this. I'm planning on following up with the Beyond TV forums to see if anyone else is doing this.
• Moved the DVICO product over to the HTPC system to see if this would work when directly connected to the system and displaying using the front end projector. Install worked fine, received HD signal for over the air content, but no video! This I think is related to the version of the Radeon drivers I'm using as I haven't upgraded this is a while. Next up, upgrade the video driver. More to follow...

Home Theater HD Project

I successfully upgraded the drive in my DVR (digital video recorder) system last night! The ghosting process has allowed me to move to the 250 gig drive I mentioned in my previous post. This gives me the 120 gig drive to fall back on in the event the upgrade doesn't work. Checking the tracking log for the USB HD over the air product looks like delivery will be tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have time this weekend to start the upgrade process which will include updating Beyond TV to version 4.3 and installing the new hardware.

I'm also starting to look at replacing the Meedio HTPC menu application I've been using for several years with Beyond Media. I'm finding the all in one solution of using Beyond TV with Beyond Media and the Firefly remote as having an advantage of everything working together well. Meedio has been sold to Yahoo so future development of this product is done. More to follow...

Home Theater HD Project

After working with the PCI Dvico HD over the air product I've decided that it's time to upgrade my current DVR system running Beyond TV to the latest version with support for HD. The goal is to keep the current analog encoder card for analog cable, and due to space issues (the DVR is running on a small form factor PC) I'm going to use the USB version of the Dvico Gold product for OTA HD encoding.

I'm also planning on ghosting the current 120 gig drive in the system to a 250 gig which will retain the old configuration and give me additional space which will be needed to support the transport stream files that are very large as part of the HD recording process.

If all goes well I'll also be upgrading the HTPC system I have in my home theater area (which is also connected 100 meg to the wired network I have in my basement) with the Beyond TV Link product which will bring live and recorded HD to the front projection system I have in place.

Home Theater Update

Changed the theme a bit recently in the home theater area. I now have Lord of the Rings posters as well as the stand up Legolas in the corner. The sword is Aragorn's reforged king sword!