"Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950, HVR-1250, and HVR-1600" by Troy H. Cheek on Mar 17, 2008
In spite of this being the digital age, I still don't have digital satellite or cable. I have plain old "extended basic" analog cable television service. I still only have analog cable because 1) digital cable costs more, 2) digital means additional boxes hooked to every television set in my house, and 3) Cardassian Cable doesn't want to sell it to me.
#3 isn't a joke, folks. Sure, I get sales calls every month or so telling me what a great deal digital cable is, how I'll get so many more channels, how crystal clear everything will be, etc. But after the first few times of actually trying to sign up, I gave up. I live out in the boonies. When the sales staff tries to enter my address into the computer, it pops up some warning about how digital is not reliable in my area due to the cabling not being upgraded yet, digital is not yet available in my area, or even that Cardassian Cable doesn't supply cable to my area and why am I on their call list in the first place?
In spite of all that, I not only have analog cable, but I have Cardassian Cable's Blazing Fast(tm) Internet service. Said Internet service is only available in areas which have digital cable service, or so the sales staff told me when they refused to sell me Internet service. Many years ago, I was told that digital cable was available in my area, so premium channels would no longer be available to us plain old analog customers. We could upgrade to digital or do without. I decided to do without. However, I also decided that I'd like to try the Internet service, but they wouldn't sign me up for that because it wasn't available in my area. It was only available in areas whose cables had been upgraded to handle a digital signal. Which mine had because otherwise they wouldn't be cutting off my premium analog channels.
Lather, rinse, and repeat for a few weeks. Even after they cut off the analog premium channels, they still tried to bill me for them. Even after they finally hooked up the Internet service, the sales department still claims it's not available. They even tried to disable my email account because I must have obtained it by illegal means as it was only available to customers with Internet service, which wasn't available in my area.
So, if I don't have digital cable, why am I talking about the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950, the HVR-1250, and the HVR-1600 hybrid video tuners? Because I just had to check on something.
Thanks to the FCC trying to find new ways of charging for things that God fully intended to be free, plain old-fashioned standard definition (SD) analog over-the-air (OTA) television transmissions (TV) will end as soon as Congress stops passing extensions. What this means to most people is, well, a lot of nothing. Most people get their television from satellite or cable, not from OTA. Satellite is all digital anyway, and cable companies mostly get things from satellite feeds and rebroadcast them analog or digital or whatever. So, after analog OTA stops, people with satellite or cable will continue to get their television exactly the way they've always been getting it.
There is some provision in there that cable companies that have been providing analog signals can stop them at the same time the OTA stops, but the cable companies can only do that if all of their customers have already switched over to digital. I'm not sure if Cardassian Cable plans to do that or not. The last I heard, they intended to continue to provide analog cable in my area. Of course, these are the same customer service people who tell me that I don't have cable Internet.
Thanks to a basic misunderstanding of the FCC's "must carry" laws, most cable companies provide local channels in an unscrambled, unencrypted, easily tuned digital format, even to analog customers like myself. In my case, that's affiliates for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW (formerly UPN), and PBS. The theory is that since I could pick up all those stations free OTA with an antenna anyway, there is no reason not to send them down the cable. They forget that the main reason most people in my area have cable to begin with is that they can't pick up anything with an antenna.
Regardless, I decided that it was time to experiment with digital television. Since my choices were to spend several hundred dollars on a decent digital tuning television or just a hundred or two on a computer peripheral to do the same, I decided to go the computer route.
My first attempt was the HVR-950, or HVR-980 as it identifies itself after installing the latest drivers. This is a tiny device that plugs into any available USB2.0 port, as long as it's not on a hub, extender, low power, or if the moon is full. Actually, it worked wherever I plugged it, but the instructions were full of ominous warnings. It came with a tiny ATSC antenna. ATSC is apparently the format by which digital television signals are sent OTA. The tiny ATSC antenna did nothing, nor did the old standby antenna nailed to the side of the house. Hooking the HVR-950 up to my analog cable did nothing, but I didn't expect it to.
Analog cable, and analog OTA for that matter, are NTSC. This format has been around for the better part of a century, but will disappear from OTA because it's analog and takes up a lot of bandwidth. It has been replaced by ATSC for broadcast television and QAM for cable. I'm told that's incorrect; that actually digital OTA and cable both use the same technology, just slightly different implementations. But I think they deserve different names because a receiver that works with one will simply not work with the other unless specifically designed to do so. The HVR-950 was designed only for OTA ATSC, so I guess it's no surprise that it didn't detect any QAM channels. Back to the store it went.
My next attempt was the HVR-1250 which was rated for both ATSC and QAM. It was also rated for analog. However, it tuned both digital and analog from a single combined tuner that my favorite PVR software couldn't talk to, so back to the store it went as well. I'm not sure if it would have worked with the included software, telling me whether I actually had any digital channels to tune in the first place, as I decided it was easier to return the box unopened rather than try to explain all that.
My most recent attempt was the HVR-1600. I actually went looking for another model, but this was the one that was available. And on sale. This had one tuner for plain old analog NTSC cable and another for digital ATSC/QAM. The analog tuner worked pretty much on par with my PVR-500 from the same company. I'm quite happy with it. The digital tuner is another story.
Once again, not OTA ATSC signals. However, a quick (20 minute) scan did discover several unencrypted QAM channels from the supposedly exclusively analog cable. Unfortunately, no two scans ever found the same channels. I tried every combination of cables, splitters, amps, attenuators, and prayers I had on hand, but I could not tune all my local stations reliably. My current configuration gets me the Fox, CW, and PBS affiliates.
While everyone rants about how great high definitions (HD) is, the simple fact is that the vast majority of content created in the last 67 years of television is standard definition (SD). Broadcasting SD in digital doesn't magically make it HD. Sure, it looks better as you save a few conversion steps, but the picture doesn't suddenly contain ten times more detail.
Still, the SD shows I have captured digitally through the HVR-1600 do look nicer. The HD show I watched was so much better than the SD version showing at the same time on another channel that my eyeballs dried out from all the staring. Admittedly, it was a crap show that I would never have watched had it not been for that comparison, but still, I think I finally understand what some of the fuss is about.
But it's not enough to keep the HVR-1600 for, so it is going back as well.
As that exhausts all the digital computer tuners available from my local store, I have gone to the Internet using that blazing fast connection I can't possibly have because it's not available in my area and have ordered yet another tuner which is supposedly much better. We shall see.
