Salutations Wwwillie,
...internet connection? ...HDMI? ...wireless... ...bandwidth?
It's OKay on cable around here and i noticed their major concurrent is ready to deploy a new service to compete theirs, but even a large variety of channels is worthless when the whole deal won't appeal globally, for some reason...
It's not the media, it's the era it seems! TV programming just feels inapropriate these days, or more likely i just don't correspond to a stereo-typical target audience anymore! Yet, when i do find something to watch one of the worst inconveniencies i observed was caused by delays/glitches related to intermediary processing hardware serving the needs of a cable company in priority...
I mean, the first "converter" boxes were bad enough as these were incompatible with an otherwise perfectly working remote control (if lucky enough to have one!), then appeared expensive descramblers and some associated "notch" in-line filters, etc., etc. Everytime it seemed the inconveniencies had to be on the customer's side, systematically, while they milked the cow after raising our expenses as a reward, etc... Now i wonder what i get for being a long-time customer, i may be watching TV something like, hummm... depends on the week! Not to the point i can justify keeping cable-TV and yet i didn't have it cut so far.
Nonetheless, the very best quality-signal at reach is local (wireless) ATSC and i've preserved it via simple coupling through this old device below:
The analog way! One centralized antena serves them all because it feeds my own private cable through that module, so to speak. Meaning televisions remain fully functional and independant. But i can only capture 4 ATSC channels at most, so i've considered the addition of an ATSC modulator to create a complementary channel to the 4 others, so i can feed it via my computer which also has a TV-tuner card plus optical disc player, on top of VLC, YouTube, whatever... My hope it to preserve full Close-Caption functionality on that private section, because it turns out their cable-box messes up with my TV's own integrated features somehow, and i wish i could do something about it...
So that's where the HDMI I/O card comes to play. No idea what that would be like starting from there...
To get programming you need a decent internet connection.
And a few more bells & whistles!!
Right now i'd want to read about some silent passive-cooling "Hackintosh" mPCIe SSD machine running Linux for a change!...
...storage to hold the program...
As i pointed out it's no fun if the picture won't come up instantly, only to look compressed. Maybe i can't by-pass processing delays in my cable-TV box but i can still avoid digital conversion: i already have regional ATSC sources distributed internally right now. The rest is obviously-compressed cable stuff...
At the moment my monitor also happens to be one of the TV sets linked to my private cable-TV line i'll admit, the Archer module was modified in order to by-pass its trio of VHF-to-UHF modulators: instead my UHF antenna replaces one of those custom-channel UHF modulators at the RF-combiner level and hence this is how it gets distributed, simultaneously to VHF (Ch.-3/FM) signals, etc.
That should get us started.
I won't say i completely failed having wireless TV in my veranda but i felt the machine + software combination ain't optimal... Perhaps it will work better next time i give it another try, since technology continuously evolves.
Good day, have fun!!
