Highly Defined Digital Goodness

After suffering from completely crap, yeah crap TV reception where I live I can say we've pretty much given up watching TV. For the most part we'll just download the next day (or sometimes the same day) from BitTorrent where most shows were ripped from a high definition source. Mmmmm, digital goodness. Even after compression this is way, way better than you could ever get from regular TV reception - even over cable.

Now just remember this is free to air TV content we're talking about - I don't feel any remorse over copyright or anything like that. Sure, most BitTorrent content has had commercials edited out, but lets face it, if I had decent TV reception I'd be using TiVo or something like that so I could skip over the commercials as do all my friends with cable.

Enter stage right the DVICO Fusion HDTV5 USB HD tunner and one DB2 HD indoor/outdoor antenna both orders from PCAlchemy.

Well after that, lets just say fuzzy, crappy, marginal TV reception days are gone, gooooone. Good bye NTSC, hello 780p, 1080i, Dolby AC-3 and 5.1 surround sound.

So far its been pretty much all good. The only problems are that a) my computer isn't really fast enough to deal with HD, surround sound and saving everything to HD for ad-skipping (yeah, ad-skipping you're sure you betcha) and b) for some strange reason the supplied remote control would work on none of the three computers I install the DVICO box on.

a) is no big deal, I'm on a mono-core 2.4Ghz 533Mhz FSB P4 with an nVidia Ti4200 - hot stuff four years ago but a long way behind the curve now. Sooner or later dual-core goodness and a bad ass video card will come my way.

b) is well, ultimately also no big deal. The software supplied with the DVICO box is great for watching TV but Snapstream has something a lot better and it comes with its own RF remote control.

I did contact DVICO about b) and they told me to RMA the device to the seller - PC Alchemy. PC Alchemy were very good and actually tested my device albeit on a Windows Media Center machine (mine is plain XP based). Yes they actually have tech guys to test stuff, its not just a drop-ship operation. Unfortunately for me the remote worked fine for them so they returned it back to me and offered help with installing the s/w.

Normally I would be suspicious that there is something wrong with my machine but I have actually tried the s/w and h/w on three different computers with now joy which is why I was convince my remote is broken. Since they say it works I can only assume its something driver or OS related and that most people are using this box with WMC and haven't had a problem. In any case I don't really care about the remote much... when my hardware gets upgraded I'll ultimately switch to Snapstream and have no use for it anyway.