myTrevor.com

For the last few days I’ve been looking at adding a TV Tuner card to my new computer. I had one in my old computer, an ATI All-In-Wonder, and miss not being able to watch/record TV on my desktop.

So I was looking around pricewatch and Google’s Froogle for the tuners and found that ATI made a HDTV — the ATI HDTV Wonder Remote Control Edition. I instantly think — oh shit, this would be awesome — and at $170ish bucks (retails for $199), I could own an HDTV! Well - after I do some quick research and find a great price, I order it. I then do more research (I’m such an impulse buyer) and realize… no, not quite… it doesn’t support QAM, even though it does, it’s been disabled in the chip. What does this mean? It means you can’t hook it up to cable and it requires OTA HDTV reception. So even though I pay my cable bill, it’s basically for people who, well.. I guess don’t have cable?

It’s still a great card, it supports analog and much the stuff other tuners support, but I guess because of licensing with all the cable providers, QAM cards are far from the market (although I did find one available). I’ve still been debating over whether or not to buy the card, but with my crappy cell-phone reception in my apartment and barely-audible radio reception… I wasn’t too confident about getting the 13 free-to-air channels available in this part of Seattle.

I read up some more and realized that the FCC requires that cable providers provide cable boxes with IEEE-1394, or Firewire, built in.

Why does this matter?
Well, you can hook this up to your computer and not need a tuner card at all. So for about a dollar more a month, I can exchange my current set top box (currently $5.10 a month… I’m a sucker the the programming guide) with an HDTV compatible box and run a cable to my computer. But now I’m thinking this will be lame. I’m almost sure that this means I’d have to dedicate this to my computer and not utlize TV Guide, on-demand and such on my TV. Now the debate. Do I just get a cheap analog TV tuner for $40? Do I hookup to the box for $1 a month and possibly lose the box for my TV? Do I get the HDTV tuner and risk just getting analog and out $170?

Well.. I decided I’d try out the $1 a month deal.. since I’m not at much a risk and see how that goes. I asked if I could just come in and pick it up. But of course, Comcast told me they require someone to bring it to my home.. because I’ve never had HD cable, and they have to “make sure it works” — and with a $15 service charge. Right.

So the Sunday, the 26th of September I’ll potentially have HDTV on my computer. I think realistically, I’ll have a monitor hooked up to a cable box (whew hoo). But we’ll see.

So I’ve finally sat down and created a blog. We’ll see how this one goes. Back in the beginnings of LiveJournal, I setup an account and updated it about once in a blue moon - this may be different.

What’s my goal?
To share my thoughts with those you care to read them and also have a place where I can write some not-so-private thoughts for personal reference. We’ll see how it goes!