beyond TV with USB tuner

[dmehling]

I have a couple of questions regarding the use of Beyond TV and a USB tuner device. I have seen many USB tuners claiming to be HD capable. Is it possible to get a high-quality HD picture with such a device using Beyond TV? Secondly, will my old Pentium 4 2.0 GHz desktop work adequately with such a setup?

[Terminal]

I believe the only USB HD tuner is the HD-PVR. The HD-PVR uses the component video (YCrCb) from a cable or Sat Set Top Box. For recording, your machine should be fine, as all the recording and processing is handled by the HD-PVR. Would depend on your video card as to whether or not you can play it back.

[rothe]

Let's rephrase what Terminal said: "the only *component input* USB HD tuner is the HD-PVR." That's about the only way to record HDTV from premium channels such as those receivable by a cable, FIOS or satellite set top box.

For those who would settle for receiving clear-QAM (unencrypted digital cable) or over-the-air (OTA) broadcast signals, there are plenty of USB devices that work just fine. Besides the PCIe cards listed in my signature, I also have a Hauppauge HVR-950 that I have used successfully while my main rig was down. At that time, I ran my recordings on a 1GHz Pentium M laptop, and used Beyond TV's Showsqueeze (bandwidth compression) function to crunch the files down so that they would play back adequately on the same laptop. The laptop didn't have the CPU or GPU horsepower to play back the original 1080i captured file, but it did just fine with a Showsqueezed file.

So your 2GHz P4 will function fine as a BTV "server." However, playback capability will be dictated by your video card and GPU more than by your CPU.

[TomXP411]

actually, the HD-PVR isn't a tuner. It's a capture device.

dmehling: there are lots of good USB tuners out there. If you're going to use an antenna for digital TV, you can use a $40-50 "stick" tuner.

If you want to record from cable, you should get a tuner that has hardware MPEG encoding. This is more expensive, but it will give you the maximum flexibility: you can record locals in ClearQAM, and you can record analog channels in MPEG2 format. You can also record from your cable box (if you have one) via an s-video cable, but it will only be SD.

[tanglin999]

I have a Pinnacle USB stick which is not supported by BTV (4.9.x) - any recommendations from the group for a USB tuner which is supported for clear QAM?

(Since there's not really much interest from Snapstram supporting my stick, it'll probably be much faster to get another than to wait until it's supported - probably never)...

[tscales]

For HD, there is no such thing as MPEG encoding. The stream is already MPEG and just written to disk.

The Hauppauge PVR-950Q should be nice. Haven't tried. Big believer in the HDHomerun personally.

[Nacho]

I have the 950Q from Hauppauge which connects through the USB ports. It allows for QAM recording and does so perfectly on my P4.

The shows are recorded as MPEG transport stream, which basically are MPEG 2 recordings so any computer will play those back.

If I needed more tuners, I would probably go with the HDHR, to avoid the cable mess on the back of the BTV server.

IB

[Banjo H]

Almost any of the USB HD tuners work great for over-the-air signals. I have two such, Hauppauge and AVerMedia. There is absolutely no quality difference between any of the tuners for OTA HD - the tuner does nothing to the show. The only real difference I have found is in sensitivity and ability to lock on the channel (all of mine are fine, as I live real close to all the towers). USB2 has spenty of bandwidth to hande HD as well, as it is 480Mbs and a single OTA stream is 20Mbps.

[tanglin999]

Presumably the same - no real issues - with cable QAM?

[Terminal]

For some reason I wasn't thinking about QAM or OTA HD, but that's not entirely true either I thought about the HDHomerun, but it's not USB. There are a bunch of USB OTA or QAM tuners but I guess that's been established by now.

[TomXP411]

Originally Posted by tscales

For HD, there is no such thing as MPEG encoding. The stream is already MPEG and just written to disk.

I know. I was talking about analog channels and recordings from the cable box (which are analog, regardless of whether the cable box is on a digital channel.)

tanglin: I use the Hauppauge 1950. It can do ATSC (HD from an antenna), ClearQAM, and has hardware compression for analog recordings.

[tanglin999]

Tom - thanks. That looks like a good box, I might give it a try. I have a small form PC, not too much power, and cannot fit any modern cards in.

[captain_video]

Until just recently I was running six V-Box 3560 USB tuners and they worked great with BeyondTV. My only problem with them was that the external USB hub I was using had a tendency of dropping offline and effectively disabling the tuners, resulting in the loss of any scheduled recordings until I discovered they were missing. The V-Box tuners were exceptional at picking up weak stations and outperformed any other tuner in this area that I've tried (Hauppauge PVR-950, On-Air USB HDTV, Hauppauge HVR-2250, and the HDHomeRun). I believe the 3560's have been discontinued but there may be a newer model that replaced it. If you decide to go with multiple external USB tuners, just make sure you have a good quality powered USB hub. I was using a Belkin hub so you might want to consider a different brand.

I had also been experiencing stuttering during playback of my BeyondTV recordings. I just upgraded my HTPC's motherboard, CPU, memory and CPU cooler this past weekend and now playback is silky smooth with no problems. I went from an older socket 939 Asus motherboard with a 125-watt AMD Athlon X2 CPU to a MSI motherboard and a 65-watt Athlon Black Edition X2 CPU. I'm pretty sure my stuttering issue was heat related and the new setup definitely runs much cooler. I had also been using a Zalman 9500 CPU cooler and switched to the Noctua NH-C12P per the recommendation on the silentpcreview website. My HTPC case prevents me from using a tall CPU cooler and I had to modify a crossmember in the case to shoehorn the Noctua cooler and make it fit.

[tanglin999]

Thanks Captain!

What did/do you use as a splitter/amplifier for that setup? I will have to split once more if I use this on the TV I want to, and the house connections seem to be quite loaded up now, possibly at a limit.

[captain_video]

I just used a generic 8-way splitter that I picked up on ebay. I've read that you should use one rated just for VHF/UHF frequencies. The ones rated up to 2GHz are for satellite signals and supposedly could cause issues with OTA signals. I'm not sure why this would be the case but they'd be overkill for OTA reception anyway. I'm not currently using any amplifier but I just replaced the one antenna pointing at Washington, DC, this past weekend and I didn't see an appreciable increase in signal strength. I have an inline amplifier that I'll probably use for the DC feed. I don't recall the make and model but I believe I picked it up on Amazon.com based on some recommendations I read elsewhere. I'll post my findings after I try it out and see if it makes any difference in the signal strength.

One caveat about using amplifiers and splitters that I should mention. Too strong of a signal can cause just as many problems as a weak signal. There's a sweet spot you need to find that will make your tuners happy. The problems associated with a weak signal should be obvious but having too strong of a signal can overdrive the tuner and screw up the reception. Also, if you're going to split the signal, use a splitter that will provide the maximum number of outputs you need in a single package. Using individual 2-way or 4-way splitters in series will attenuate the signal even more due to the number of connections involved. A splitter will attenuate the signal by about 3dB. A coax connector adds about 0.5dB of additioonal attenuation. Keeping the number of connections to a minimum will guarantee the highest possible signal strength throughout the signal path.