I saw in coles today they were selling MTV brand digital set top boxes for $75.

I really find the whole thing hard to understand...HDTV etc...please help.

Currently I get pretty lousy reception in my room for TV. It's a standard 51cm flat screen tv, and some s*** antenae i bought for it but my room is at the bottom of the house so reception blows. It's watchable on most channels tho...I guess im just used to it.

My question is this:

Will a cheap set top box improve my situation? Or are only the expensive ones any good?

Will I get good reception if i get a digital receiver, keeping in mind i currently get bad reception on a normal antenae?

And lastly, any recommendations for which set top box i should get, where from, and how much?

thanks.

All I could find on google:

http://www.dtvforum.info/lofiversion/index.php/t26837.html

Just get a nice cheap one. From my experience it greatly improved my reception which used to be poor.

set top boxes do a s***load for reception, provided you have a semi reasonable signal. I had reasonable reception and a 68cm flatscreen and it made a huuuuuge difference. I have a $200 one but i have no use for it now as i have foxtel digital, i'd give it to ya for $100 or something if you wanted (it's not HDTV.)

last edited by simE at 19:59:57 08/Dec/05

lol coles
it will break and you will become a very unhappy geek
at least u can return it for a refund (i think..provided you have the receipt)

Are you superform?

I got a s***ty one from jbhifi and it greatly improved my reception. Our house has the s***tiest reception but now its great. Just got it all set up properly yesterday and so glad I got it.
You still need an antena, ours is a decent one on the roof, dunno how it would work with cheap antena.
We live around lots of hills and trees so thats why we have s*** reception. If I turn on normal channel 10 now it would be no picture or sound at all, however the digital picture is perfect.

Also we have 3 set top boxes in our house ranging from good to crap, all reception is the same you are just paying extra for features.

I have a digital HDTV tuner in my PC, our analog reception is so bad my parents got foxtel just so you can see a picture, my analog reception wasn't much better, snowy, shadows, ghosting, you name it but with the digital reciever I get crystal clear picture with good signal strength.
The only downside to it is when it rains the tuner software doesn't seem to be able to handle all the signal interruptions from lightning/raindrops on my f***ing aerial and just crashes, my friend up the road has a digital set top box, same clear picture but during storms he finds the picture freezes all over the place as well (mine freezes all over the place before it eventually quits).

I guess in short: digital tv good for getting clear picture in clear weather, s***house for anything in bad weather if you're far away from the transmitter tower.

no f***pot. are you?

has a digital set top box, same clear picture but during storms he finds the picture freezes all over the place

Yes channel 10 jolts hardcore during storms, other channels are ok.

put a booster on your arial too. then get a digital terastrial tv card in a pc, setup media centre, pause live tv ect.

simE I might be interested!

msn/email me at mrcs_82@ h o t m a i l. com

To give you an idea on how much of an improvement it makes, when I first moved into my new house I plugged the STB in and as expected the reception was spot on. However over the next few days it would break up, loose sound, etc and became a real pain in the ass.

I blamed everything from the s***ty wiring to the aerial, s***ty STB, etc and decided to plug the aerial into the TV and I couldn't even see a picture through all the snow.

STB = WIN! It's digital so its either working or not, just need a semi-decent signal to start with.

mooby, MCE sucks in australia because we dont use ATSC... and there is no guide.

I bought a teac stb about 18 months ago (yeah, I know, teac... but they were one of the big brands back then)

It works fine, but its not very sensitive... I have a really reliable aerial man, and he suggested that the best STB's are those that use a PowerPC processor. Nextwave and Topfield are two that I know use them (in some models)

What you have to understand is that all these cheap chinese ones need REALLY solid signal otherwise they wont give you much of anything.

Also, HDTV costs a lot more than $75. You'd be looking at $400 minimum I would think... plus, you'd need a good TV capable of displaying HDTV resolutions (ie. HD CRT, HD Plasma, LCD)

The $75 as well as all the others under about $400, are Standard Definition. From memory its 576p or 720i or something, and is what most people will end up with. All TV comes in SD, but only selected shows are available in HD.

Basically, spend $200 and get a good SD box, otherwise, keep using your analogue tuner until you can affoard to buy a good, $200 SD box.

edit: More to the point, Digital won't "improve" your reception. You have to have reasonable reception to get picture/sound. But being digital, there is no half-way (snow) you either get good signal and perfect picture quality, or no signal and no picture/sound.

You need a digital aerial, or at least a digital compatible aerial.

Digital helped me because I had strong signal, but I got terrible ghosting due to reflections from a mountain... Digital is immune to this.

last edited by mongie at 23:04:02 08/Dec/05

a better, free, alternative to media centre is media portal. It's open source meaning it's legally free, it does need a chunky computer to run though and things tend to be a tad slow, though they are getting faster. When I first started using it, it took ages to load up and do stuff but with v2 release canditate something or other, its really quite an improvement & still under development so should see more improvements yet.

The $100 one i got from JBHIFI massively improved reception here which has always been s***. Can't get any of the HDTV channels, but that still gives ABC2 the SBS2 thingo and 3 copies of some other channels. So while I don't have hdtv i've never seen better pictures on my tv.

Apparently the Topfield TF4000T is the way to go now, according to some STB forums I've been checking out. It uses a Power PC processor.

It's still Standard Definition but picture quality is meant to be closer to HD.

At $210-$300 tho it's pretty pricey.

Mongie, I've got some $15 antenae from brisbane car sound or some s***. So this may not be useable for STB? s***.

I was considering getting a HDTV digital tuner for my PC and using a nice big monitor to watch things on. Seems to be a fairly cheap option.

yay clearer tv. now if only there was anything decent on it to watch...

I used to use a crappy rabit ears aerial on my HDTV PCI card (Twinhan - POS) and it worked not too bad.

Hey, as long as you have a semi decent signal then it should work fine.
The picture quality is a lot better and you can get a few extra channels such as SBS 1 - 2 etc.

I've noticed that when there is rain / storm the digital signal seems to get messed up more easily, but apart from that it's great.

:)

Well I got the $75 mtv box.

Seems to do the job! Good reception now!

Simply put...

Analog TV works similarly to analog AM (I think) radio. With radio, the recieved signal (after demodulation) represents the amplitude of the sound wave at that particular instant.

With analog TV, a frame is sent one line at a time, and each line is represented with two analog signals, one is the base colour of whatever pixel we are up to, the other signal is the brightness of whatever pixel we are up to. Without going into too much detail, whenever a signal is recieved, it is assumed to be the correct signal at that instant.

Obviously, if the TV just assumes that whatever it recieves is the right signal, then any errors in the signal will show up on the screen. For example, if there is a lot of random noise in the chanel, the TV simply assumes the picture it is meant to be displaying contains a lot of randomness (snow), or if the signal sent from the Tx arrives at our antenna along two seperate paths, (like directly and bounced off a building) the TV assumes the picture actually has a faint copy of itself shifted a little to the right (ghosting).

How digital STB helps this is, it streams content digitally through an entirely seperate TV channel. This streaming is virtually identical to streaming video over the internet (DVB uses the MPEG-4 suite of codecs incidentally). Just like with streaming video over the internet, error control codes are used to ensure the accuracy of the stream, and just like the internet, if something causes the channel to become congested or blocked, the stream stalls or drops frames etc.

The difference between SD and HD are that the SD stream is made up of a ~576 x ~920 pixel video stream and a L+R Dolby Digital audio stream. The HD stream is made up of a video stream with a resolution of at least 720 x 1280 pixels, and a 5.1 chanel Dolby Digital audio stream. Of course building a hardware decoder to handle both types of streams is expensive, and if the target system is not a HD display (PC monitor, or HD LCD, or HD plasma) then the signal (576 line SD or 720 line HD) is converted to a 576 line analog signal anyway, so most of the STB on the market are SD only.

Thanks Houn, I found that both entertaining and informative.