TV madness

So, our dorm is being renovated now, and I have moved into my own flat (let me quote wikipedia here: "flat often denotes a housing block of lesser quality meant for lower-income groups", as I see it quite fit).

After having seen that the only window is facing north, I realized the luxury of DVB-S reception would be gone soon, so - living in an area with usually good DVB-T reception - I decided to buy a USB DVB-T receiver.

So I moved in, hooked up the receiver to the antenna outlet I found in my room - and came to the conclusion that there is some kind of converter installed in the building that converts "something" into 16 analog video channels. So I was unable to use my DVB-T-device which I didn't like as recording broadcasts with a DVB device is a piece of cake compared to analog systems that need to encode the pictures and audio on the fly to something digital that can be stored efficiently on a harddisk.

Next thing I tried was an old indoor antenna my parents bought two decades ago (something like these things that can be found at amazon), but it gave poor reception nonetheless. Well, to no wonder - the DVB transmitter is south of Erlangen (Fernmeldeturm Nürnberg), and I'm located north of the building, so I have the whole armored concrete of the building between me and the transmitter...

I didn't want to give up easily so I googled around and ordered a better antenna, and reception indeed got better (but still is not perfect). At least as long as I just used my notebook to watch TV... when I finally had my desktop PC set up again in my new flat I plugged in the DVB-T device and started kaffeine as I did on my notebook (and previously with my DVB-S device on my desktop), but did not get any usable MPEG stream out of the device. Without moving anything else I plugged the device back into the notebook, et voila - acceptable results.

So I guess (without having thought about it further yet) that the PC emits EMI into the device via the USB cable which distorts (the already bad) reception even more.

With other things still left to do concerning my relocation I decided to handle this problem at a later time and installed getstream (which I already knew from my good old times at the dorm) on my notebook - to end up with a crazy setup of "notebook receives DVB-T stream, repacks it into http which is served over WLAN to my desktop machine 3 meters away".

Some weeks later (I.e. today) I had some spare time and decided that it was not the most efficient way to just watch TV, therefore I searched for my old Hauppauge WinTV PCI card (with BT848 (!) chipset), labeled "copyright 1996 Hauppauge Computer Works", inserted it into my PC and soldered a coaxial cable to corresponding connectors so that I could hook up my PC with the antenna outlet.

Seemed to work so far - until, a minute after the tuned channel was shown on my screen, the PC just reset hard. I thought "hmmmm", let the machine come up again, started the TV program again, aaaand - RESET.

So, while it might theoretically be possible to watch (analog) TV now without the indirection over my notebook and the WLAN, the hardware resets make that impossible in reality.

Now I've reverted to the "be your own wireless TV station"-workaround for the moment - but I will not give up! ("Never give up, never surrender!"). Maybe I'll manage to get the analog part of my hybrid USB device working (according to the driver sources, it's just a matter of manipulating the switching chip on the USB device as the driver for the analog USB part that is integrated into the box is already present in mainline linux kernels and should recognize it once it is connected to the USB bus internally - time for some old-style hacking, I guess *sigh*, but I don't think I'll be having time for this tinkering around with the exams in April hanging over my head like the sword of damocles...)