Kaenneth's Journal: OTA HD is a pain.

I'm still working on setting up an Over the Air HD antenna, for use with Windows Media Center...

My first antenna, an indoor one did not work very well, particularly, channels would skip out if someone walked between it and the transmitter.

Also, skips in the video stream would cause my video drivers to crash, taking out Windows, (which, I suppose would be a benifit of Vista, if it can restart the video subsystem without rebooting the machine.)

Updating the video driver seems to have solved that problem, and I managed to obtain an antenna for my roof. The box said it included all needed equipment, but I still had to buy a video cable, a mast, clamps for the mast, a grounding wire (copper is expensive nowdays), and an amplifier.

I plan to lock the antenna in one position, as I don't know of any computer controlled antenna rotors, and that I may want to watch one channel, while recording another, with the transmitters in different directions. Ideally, the large, amplified roof antenna would give me a good enough signal on enough channels without specific aiming.

I still don't have access, in Media Center to the secondary channels, that is, I have 4.1, 5.1, and 7.1, but I can't get to 5.2 or 7.2 on Media Center, while the HDTV set itself can tune them. It's my understanding that this is because the online Program Guide lacks data for those channels; but I still can't manually tune to them.

Maybe Vista will do it better, but I'm holding out for a Vista machine until I can get a 'CableCard' tuner, at which time the OTA antenna will be obselete.