HTPC and Firewire Results

Sunday, June 15, 2008

In my last post I discussed how to setup the Rogers 3250HD box with MythTV using firewire in order to record channels right off the box including some HD channels, the holy grail of a Canadian HTPC and PVR setup. Unfortunately I ran out of time and did not get a chance to report on the results in terms of quality and what channels are available in HD to record so this post will correct that omission.

I went through each of the HD channels one by one to determine which ones were accessible and which were not. After that process I updated my channel lineup in Schedules Direct to just include the accessible channels and you can view my lineup of channels that worked at http://www.gexperts.com/blog/files/schedulesdirect/schedule.html. These are all of the channels that worked over firewire, trimming the non-working channels from the list makes navigating MythTV much easier and will make it a breeze for my wife to know what channels can and cannot be recorded.

With respect to the HD channels, most of the channels I am interested in are accessible through firewire. I found that I could get most of the HD Canadian channels (Global, CTV and CITY) with the notable exception of CBC but no worries there as I am not a fan of the mother corp. The standard American network channels (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) were all accessible on both the normal and west coast channels. Finally the only specialty channels I could get in HD were TSN, SportsNet and Discovery and this was a pleasant surprise as I did not expect any of these channels to be accessible.

The quality of the HD channels is for the most part excellent with some minor border artifacts on a few the channels. Here are some pictures of the results, you can click each picture to get a full screen image. Note that my HTPC is connected to my monitor at the moment hence why the full screen images are at 1680x1050 rather then a normal HD resolution. Here is the first shot from the west coast HD ABC channel that was showing Monsters, Inc last night.

As you can see this channel gives very nice HD output with no artifacting at all when accessed through firewire. The next image is from HD NBC which was showing Saturday Night Live last night.

If you look closely at the left side of the image you can see a thin orange bar. When you are watching it on the screen this bar grows and shrinks by a pixel or two in width every few seconds so it is more noticeable then in this static shot. Personally I do not find it a big deal though given the overall quality. Here is the next example, an image from the TSN HD channel.

Again no noticeable border artifacts here. Finally here is an image from Discovery HD.

I do not have a screenshot to show it, but some HD channels exhibit a bit of jitter when displaying an SD commercial but I've only noticed it on a few occasions. Also, some HD channels have a border artifact along the top when displaying an SD program. Neither is really a major concern for me as it does not detract from the quality of the actual programming.

In terms of useability, channel changes typically take 1-3 seconds to occur so somewhat slower then the 3250HD box itself. While not ideal it is not a showstopper for me because I plan on using the HTPC to record rather then watch LiveTV. There are no issues when flipping between channels that use different resolutions or between SD and HD channels, MythTV handles it all very gracefully. MythTV was also very good when hitting the inaccessible channels, the popup info box shows it trying to get a lock on the channel as the letters LAM slowly appear. If the channel is bad MythTV popups up a window saying the channel could not be tuned and allows you to channel change somewhere else.

Otherwise the useability of this setup is equivalent to a normal MythTV setup and all in all I'm still quite satisfied in terms of how this project turned out. I should be moving the computer downstairs to the living room in the next couple of weeks where it will get the real test with the Quality Assurance department, aka my wife.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 4:44 PM | Categories: Home Theater | | | Permalink