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So you are fed up with members of your family hogging your UHD TV that you spent a fortune on to watch the 1000th repeat of “Friends” etc.
Do you have a laptop or a PC ....if yes, you may have some possibilities to get your PC or laptop to pick up a TV transmission.
Let us assume you have a desktop PC.
Most desktop PCs should be capable of the basic function to run an application to display a TV transmission. In the UK since the change to digital video broadcasting (DVB) you have a few choices. You do not need a top end PC to do this. The most common is via the terrestial signal called (DVB-T) this is commonly referred to as "Freeview" or via satellite (DVB-S) or "Freesat".
Picture quality:
At present in the UK most HD Channels on Freesat and Freeview transmit at a resolution of 1440x1080i
(i means it is interlaced if it was p the signal would be a progressive scan)
The picture below shows ITV3 (at 544 by 576 resolution) and BBC1 HD (at 1440x1088 resolution).
Click to enlarge.
Update: 6 th June 2012:
Recently ITV and BBC have been transmitting using 1920 by 1088.
Most of the Jubilee celebrations were at 1920 by 1080. This has now become the standard for HD transmissions.
so is 4HD
according to DVBviewer these channels are 1088p
DVB-S and DVB-S2 (Digital Video Broadcast using Satellite signal)
Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2)
For DVB-S signals you will need a satellite dish
(great if you already have SKY, or you still have the SKY dish from a previous installation).
A satellite dish is not that expensive, I bought mine from eBay for £25 about 3 years ago and that also included a fairly long length of cable.
Freesat uses the same dish and satellites as Sky, all you need to do is connect a coax cable to your freesat card in your PC or your USB device.
Another way to do this is via a set top box, Freesat has approx 180 TV and radio subscription-free channels .
Most of the UK is able to get signal coverage. Freesat, a joint venture of the BBC and ITV.
You can use this tool to see what channels you can get in your area...http://www.freesat.co.uk/channels
Once you have got a dish you will need to point it at the satellite. There are many web pages which will help greatly to do this.
Basically it will tell you from the postcode you enter in which direction is 2E...try this link as a starter ...there are many of these satellite pointers.
http://www.satsig.net/maps/satellite-tv-dish-pointing-uk-ireland.htm.
Dish Pointer http://www.dishpointer.com/
If you want to know how the satellite TV works visit this link.
DVB-T and DVB-T2 (Digital Video Broadcast using Terrestial signal).
DVB-T2 is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting – Second Generation Terrestrial.
For DVB-T and DVB-T2 you will need a TV aerial to pick-up the signal and a length of coax cable to the location of your PC. If the aerial signal is weak you may need to invest in a booster for your signal. These are commonly available from many outlets.
So what else do we need? Obviously your laptop or Desktop will need to be able to produce the sound but most modern laptops or desktops would have a sound chip integrated in your device. If not fear not you can buy a soundcard or a USB soundcard to get sound.
Depending on which operating systems you are using on your IT device you will find many DVB-T or DVB-S hardware available to buy. Remember to check if you are using an Apple computer to check if that OS is supported with the hardware you are buying. Also check that your device has the slot free to house your PCI card. In most cases a card that can receive a DVT-T2 or DVB-S2 will also be able to cope with the DVB-S or DVB-T. I have also seen PCI cards that can receive both DVB-S and DVB-T, that make things a lot neater. There are many USB choices for Freeview, there are also some Freesat USB devices, the one I have come across is WinTV-NOVA-S USB2 by Hauppauge
When you buy one of these cards you may get an software application which acts as your TV , i.e. it will enable you to scan the channels and act as a PVR (Personal video receiver).
Some years ago I bought an application for €15 (DVBviewer) which is well worth the money as it so easy to use and is extremely powerful. You can also tryout Windows Media Centre which will also work.
My desktop PC has 1 DVB-T2 dual tuner and 1 DVB-S2 tuner installed. I can watch a mixture of Freesat and Freeview channels. In fact I have multiple installations of DVBviewer to have 3 TV channels playing at the same time (This is limited by the number of tuners in your installed hardware devices). Picture below shows two instances of DVBviewer and also Windows Media Centre all running at the same time on my PC.
With these type of configurations a decent video card is useful to have. My video card is an AMD RX 480 which copes admirably with Digital TV. This GPU can cope with UHD 4K transmissions using HEVC. A test channel on Astra 2E is now available.
Now for the actual tuners.
For the PC using the PCI Express slot in a PC. I am using a BLACKGOLD Dual tuner DVB-T2 PCI express card. Click on the picture to read the specs etc.
The PCI express card shown above the system board will plug into the PCI Express
slot on the motherboard. See guide below to identify the PCI slot types. The arrow is pointing to a PCIe 2.0 slot type.
I also have a PCI card for the DVB-S2 for satellite reception. This is fitted to slot 5 on the diagram above.
If you are using a laptop you are limited to the choice of hardware.
Freeview USB Device
This Satellite device has been around for a few years now.
So all in all, if you cannot get to the TV find yourself a solution.
There are many help forums if you are stuck with something and remember google is your friend.
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