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Thursday, December 2, 2010

HDTV fun and games

5:13 PM / Television / 9 Comments

For the last several years, most of my TV recordings have come courtesy of the Freecom DVB-T USB stick I picked up for somewhere in the region of £15. Back then, the only television being broadcast via antenna in the UK was of the standard definition variety, but with BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all launching their own high definition terrestrial solutions in the last year, I decided I wanted to get in on the act instead of having to rely on other sources to acquire HD recordings of the relevant shows.

The only problem? Until recently, it was impossible to get hold of a computer-based device capable of receiving DVB-T2, the transmission system used for HD terrestrial broadcasts in this country.

Enter the solution: MyGica's FreeView T200, the first DVB-T2 USB device available in the UK. The fine people at TVStick.co.uk got their initial shipment on Monday, dispatched one for me within about half an hour of my ordering it, and it showed up on Wednesday afternoon. That's what I call great service!

Initial impressions are pretty positive, taking into account the newness of the device and the various technical kinks that will presumably be worked out with subsequent driver iterations. Unlike my Freecom DVB-T, which was basically a USB pen drive with an aerial connection on the back, MyGica's solution is a small hub with its own external power supply, although it still connects to the system via USB. The bundled HiDTV software can only be described as unstable, at least on my system - it crashed continually while searching for channels and took somewhere in the region of five attempts to complete a full scan. After that, it remained unstable and I was unable to get any sound (although the video looked fine).

Fortunately, I've used Windows Media Center for TV viewing and recording ever since I upgraded to Windows Vista and later Windows 7, both of which come with Media Center included, and I've always found it to be vastly superior to any of the various freeware TV options, as well as ArcSoft's TotalMedia (which came bundled with my Freecom stick). Therefore, I promptly ditched HiDTV and switched to Media Center, which detected and played all the relevant channels with no problems.

The image quality seems good - certainly as good or better than the various alternatives I've been relying on for HD shows I watch. The recordings are all in Microsoft's proprietary .wtv format, which only plays in Media Center or Windows Media Player. I personally don't have a huge problem with this as both are perfectly adequate programs, but if anyone knows of a way of converting these files into something more compatible (without re-encoding, naturally), I'd be interested to hear.

A slight problem, though: for some reason no programme guide data is available for any of the four HD channels (BBC One HD, BBC HD, STV HD and Channel 4 HD) in Media Center. Apparently this is a problem between Microsoft and Freeview HD and one that affects at least one other HDTV receiver (the Black Gold BGT3620). For three of the four channels, the most straightforward solution is to sync each channel with the TV guide data from its standard definition counterpart. Obviously this doesn't work for BBC HD, which has no SD equivalent. File it under "problems I can live with but hope they fix before too long."

The only other problem I've encountered in Media Center is that sometimes on startup, or upon changing channels, it will randomly lose the ability to received HD content, giving me a message stating that the signal strength may be weak or the aerial may be disconnected. In these instances, opening up the HiDTV software for a few seconds (which is sometimes as long as it runs for before crashing!) is enough to solve the problem, and I'm sure it's an issue that will be cleared up eventually, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

Still, all in all I consider this £69.99 well spent. There are clearly some compatibility issues to be worked out, but until then I'm more than content to work around them in exchange for (relatively) hassle-free viewing and recording of HD content.

9 Comments

 
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