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Posted
3 minutes ago, DougO said:

Some people already have antenna cables running through their house from ages ago and don't even realize it. It still works if it ain't broke somewhere.

 

 

And if you "cut the cord," you have cables running all over the house from cable.  You can just plug the antenna into that, although an amp might be helpful in that instance.

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Posted

Right. It's the same cable used for DirecTV and such. Just find the other end and bypass the junk, hook up the antenna to the end of it.

I hooked one up like that for a friend of mine about a month ago. Got a GE like this, about $40 at Amazon or Wal Mart, sometimes in store. I use the same model out in my barn room.

v71ZEU8cJcVL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

 

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Posted

I bought a little $19 antenna on Amazon. I hooked it up to coaxial plug on the box for the frame tv and set the antenna up on the table next to the TV. I’m watching MNF on ABC over the air and the picture is just as clear as YTTV.

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Posted
1 hour ago, smokebomb said:

You can buy an HDHomerun if you want to stream OTA to multiple devices in your home:

https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/


It also works seamlessly with Plex. I set it up right before the OSU game this year when Fox had their dispute with YTTV. 

Shitty Antenna -> HDHomeRun -> Plex -> ABC -> MNF -> cool for now

HDHomerun is a nice gadget and surprisingly easy to set up.  It will also introduce you to the hidden universe of alternate broadcast channels.

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Posted
20 minutes ago, tx ind said:

Manningcast had on Bob Iger just now, most boring guest I’ve ever seen.

LOL I had to look it up to make sure we were talking about THAT Bob Iger.

They're desperate. Mouse is gonna cave.

Posted
44 minutes ago, Earl Haffler said:

Shitty Antenna -> HDHomeRun -> Plex -> ABC -> MNF -> cool for now

HDHomerun is a nice gadget and surprisingly easy to set up.  It will also introduce you to the hidden universe of alternate broadcast channels.

I'm buying a hauppauge! Wintv-duo USB tuner. Then setting up a PVR and hooking it up to my jellyfin instance so I can watch live TV anywhere I want. I'll be using this to re-stream in surly stream for those that don't want to do it all. That has Chromecast natively in the player. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, tbone_ said:

So for you OTA antenna guys, do you just drag the thing around your house if you want to watch a different TV?

Dude. They are like $30. Buy 10. 

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Posted
43 minutes ago, immamac said:

I'm buying a hauppauge! Wintv-duo USB tuner. Then setting up a PVR and hooking it up to my jellyfin instance so I can watch live TV anywhere I want. I'll be using this to re-stream in surly stream for those that don't want to do it all. That has Chromecast natively in the player. 

what-jaws-gif.1875514

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Posted
2 hours ago, dcbc said:

And if you "cut the cord," you have cables running all over the house from cable.  You can just plug the antenna into that, although an amp might be helpful in that instance.

This is exactly what I did a couple of years ago. Plugged a 40 year old set of rabbit ears into the amp that Comcast had installed in my attic to boost the cable feed to all of the rooms of the house ( back when I used Comcast ).

Cable from the wall attached to the tv in each room, change the input to antenna, and I’ve got a clear HD picture on any tv when I choose to watch a local channel that way. (Suburban Houston) 

Simple. 

Posted
7 minutes ago, Victor Lazlo said:

This is exactly what I did a couple of years ago. Plugged a 40 year old set of rabbit ears into the amp that Comcast had installed in my attic to boost the cable feed to all of the rooms of the house ( back when I used Comcast ).

Cable from the wall attached to the tv in each room, change the input to antenna, and I’ve got a clear HD picture on any tv when I choose to watch a local channel that way. (Suburban Houston) 

Simple. 

My situation is more complicated.  Roof mounted antenna.  Most towers are to the southeast (around 20 miles).  ABC is probably 20 miles to the north and is VHF.  With a preamp, I pick everything up, but ABC is super glitchy.  Tomorrow, I'm going to do what I should have done some time ago and take the slack out of that cable run (I used a section of cable from our old satellite installation and have several feet of looped cable I never cut down.  I figure a few feet shorter might get me there).

Posted
14 minutes ago, dcbc said:

My situation is more complicated.  Roof mounted antenna.  Most towers are to the southeast (around 20 miles).  ABC is probably 20 miles to the north and is VHF.  With a preamp, I pick everything up, but ABC is super glitchy.  Tomorrow, I'm going to do what I should have done some time ago and take the slack out of that cable run (I used a section of cable from our old satellite installation and have several feet of looped cable I never cut down.  I figure a few feet shorter might get me there).

I had a similar problem with KHOU 11 here. Bad signal when I would input 11 on the remotes. Every other channel was clear. Then discovered that 11.1 was what would come up when I entered 11, but they had an 11.11 available that is crystal clear.

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Posted
3 hours ago, Rimbo said:

LOL I had to look it up to make sure we were talking about THAT Bob Iger.

They're desperate. Mouse is gonna cave.

They will work out a deal, and we'll likely never know the final resolution, but my guess is the final number is a lot closer to Disney's ask than YTTV's . He who has the content has the leverage. I can get ESPN through any number of providers, but a good chunk of college football I can only get watching disney. A few additional folks may start pirating, but most people would already be pirating if that was their thing. Just on this thread count how many people have already started investigating Sling, Fubo, DTV, spectrum, etc.... Now compare that to the number of people that declared they would just stop watching sports. People will go where they can get the content they want. 

Its a good ole fashioned dick measuring contest right now, but Mickey is swinging the bigger bat.

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Posted
3 hours ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Anybody using rabbit ears to pick up KSAT near Canyon Lake? 
 


Here is the location of their broadcast tower. The green icon. Could be 40 - 50 miles, depending on where you are around Canyon Lake. I’d say that it’s possible, depending on location and obstructions.

I can pick up CBS out of College Station most of the time, their tower is roughly 50 miles from my house.

 

IMG_0099.thumb.png.ab16d22b256cc607437c1a1d8043b3ef.png

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Posted
13 hours ago, immamac said:

I'm buying a hauppauge! Wintv-duo USB tuner. Then setting up a PVR and hooking it up to my jellyfin instance so I can watch live TV anywhere I want. I'll be using this to re-stream in surly stream for those that don't want to do it all. That has Chromecast natively in the player. 

This may be the first time I've heard "Hauppauge" since 1996.

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Posted
13 hours ago, immamac said:

I'm buying a hauppauge! Wintv-duo USB tuner. Then setting up a PVR and hooking it up to my jellyfin instance so I can watch live TV anywhere I want. I'll be using this to re-stream in surly stream for those that don't want to do it all. That has Chromecast natively in the player. 

spacer.png

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Posted
13 hours ago, immamac said:

I'm buying a hauppauge! Wintv-duo USB tuner. Then setting up a PVR and hooking it up to my jellyfin instance so I can watch live TV anywhere I want. I'll be using this to re-stream in surly stream for those that don't want to do it all. That has Chromecast natively in the player. 

image.png.a01b083673fb82df99007380ba0ab17d.png

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Posted

So some potentially helpful advice for anyone who is picking up ABC (VHF) but only at yellow-bar level.  If you have an omnidirectional antenna (figure-8) with straight VHF antennae (rabbit ears) horizontally on either side, you want the you want the VHF antennae positioned perpendicular in direction with regard to the VHF tower's location.  I'm still shortening my cable run, but even before that, doing this took me from yellow to full green bars and perfect reception of ABC.

 

Stay thirsty, friends.

Posted
14 minutes ago, dcbc said:

So some potentially helpful advice for anyone who is picking up ABC (VHF) but only at yellow-bar level.  If you have an omnidirectional antenna (figure-8) with straight VHF antennae (rabbit ears) horizontally on either side, you want the you want the VHF antennae positioned perpendicular in direction with regard to the VHF tower's location.  I'm still shortening my cable run, but even before that, doing this took me from yellow to full green bars and perfect reception of ABC.

 

Stay thirsty, friends.

Confused Thinking GIF

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Posted (edited)
53 minutes ago, Drew said:

Confused Thinking GIF

We're talking I rotated the antenna 15 degrees and it went from unwatchably pixilated to perfect reception.  And I'm dealing with a relative low elevation with lots of hills and a ton of trees between me and that tower.

Edited by dcbc
Posted
5 minutes ago, dcbc said:

We're talking I rotated the antenna 15 degrees and it went from unwatchably pixilated to perfect reception.  And I'm dealing with a relative low elevation with lots of hills and a ton of trees between me and that tower.

Maribeth Monroe What GIF by CBS

 

Just joshing you man.

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Posted

https://www.theverge.com/news/818542/disney-youtube-tv-blackout-cost

 

Quote

Disney’s spat with Google’s YouTube TV over a new content distribution contract is costing the entertainment giant $4.3 million a day in lost revenue, Morgan Stanley estimates.

That’s $30 million a week as the blackout of channels including ABC and ESPN stretches into its 12th day, Variety reports, though the analysts expect Disney and Google to reach a resolution by the end of the week. The dispute is also costing Google — Variety reports that a Drive Research survey of 1,100 US consumers found 24 percent canceled or planned to cancel their subscriptions.

 

Quote

More than 20 Disney-owned channels went dark on YouTube TV after their contract expired at 11:59 PM ET on October 30th. While Google accuses Disney of pulling its channels from YouTube TV as a “negotiating tactic,” and says its terms would rise prices for YouTube TV customers, Disney says Google is “refusing to pay fair rates” for its content. Google has been giving $20 credits to its subscribers during the blackout, but it remains to be seen which will end first: the Disney-Google blackout or the government shutdown.

 

Posted
11 hours ago, Victor Lazlo said:


Here is the location of their broadcast tower. The green icon. Could be 40 - 50 miles, depending on where you are around Canyon Lake. I’d say that it’s possible, depending on location and obstructions.

I can pick up CBS out of College Station most of the time, their tower is roughly 50 miles from my house.

 

IMG_0099.thumb.png.ab16d22b256cc607437c1a1d8043b3ef.png

Thanks. Yeah I’m LOS at 177 degrees about 36 mi away. I’m up on a small ridge and have no obstructions to my south. 
 

KSAT is VHF (Hi-V) so I may just get a cheap set of rabbit ears and try that first.

Posted
47 minutes ago, John Coctostan said:

It's a town in Long Island, right?

Yep.

<warning_nerditry_follows>

They're also a computing company that basically set the gold standard for extracting and encoding video media. 

Today, running an app that lets you stream live video is common. Back in the Pentium days, when TV streams were analog signals sent over the round black 75-ohm coax cables, watching TV on a computer was instant nerd cred. It took a speedy (for the time) processor and specialized hardware. Hauppauge parlayed their proficiency at designing math co-processors (386 and 486 computers didn't natively know how to process mathematics) into extracting a video stream and encoding into a software file or playing it on the desktop. 

At any respectable nerd's house, the home network will include a NAS (Network Attached Storage - a minifridge or so sized box of hard drives that provides crap-tons of local storage) and a dedicated media server computing machine. The NAS will hold movies, music, what-have-you collected from various sources. The media server will be accessible to watch those movies either at home and, through a properly configured firewall and gateway (likely running pfsense) anywhere else he has a network connection. 

Our esteemed administrator proposes to set up a Hauppauge extractor to take the video signal from source like an antenna, forward the resulting stream to a video program, and stream it with a media server application. He's chosen an open-source (meaning not owned by a for-profit company) program as the media server, so that anyone who wants to can download a completely free app, connect to the stream he's providing, and view the game. As a bonus, that open source app natively supports Chromecast, so if you have the ability to connect your device (like a phone or computer) to a Google Chromecast item, you can watch the game on whatever TV you've chosen.

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Posted
36 minutes ago, Duane Moore said:

$20 credit emails have gone out, make sure to go claim yours if you have YTTV

Clicked the button for mine as well.

What would be interesting to know, although we most likely will never know, is how many clicked the credit vice how many of those were actually paid out. 

Posted (edited)
19 hours ago, dcbc said:

My situation is more complicated.  Roof mounted antenna.  Most towers are to the southeast (around 20 miles).  ABC is probably 20 miles to the north and is VHF.  With a preamp, I pick everything up, but ABC is super glitchy.  Tomorrow, I'm going to do what I should have done some time ago and take the slack out of that cable run (I used a section of cable from our old satellite installation and have several feet of looped cable I never cut down.  I figure a few feet shorter might get me there).

Used to be able to get a signal amplifier for about $30 that helped with weaker signals. But they are getting hard to find at a reasonable price and find one that actually works. You can try hooking up a second antenna aimed the other way and Y them together. The little plastic cover ones you can sometimes find in stores tend to be total crapola.

Edited by DougO
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Posted

I still have my old 8-foot c-band dish outside. I'm almost ready to investigate what I can get on that thing after all these years. Probably zipola, but I hate the whole streaming multiple parties model, and my internet here is shit.

Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, DougO said:

Used to be able to get a signal amplifier for about $30 that helped with weaker signals. But they are getting hard to find at a reasonable price and find one that actually works. You can try hooking up a second antenna aimed the other way and Y them together. The little plastic cover ones you can sometimes find in stores tend to be total crapola.

Thanks, but see my post (#971) above.  I got it figured out.  I already had a preamp.  Our roofers knocked our antenna off axis.  I tried to re-aim it by memory the other day (had it pointed toward a majority of the UHF antennas), but I was off as far as getting ABC goes (ABC is 20 miles in the opposite direction for us and is VHF)..  For our setup, ABC is the tough one to pick up, or so I thought.  By setting the VHF arms of the combo, omnidirectional/VHF antenna perpendicular to the tower location it came in clear as a bell (5 green bars) with the help of the preamp.  Without that pream, I get maybe one channel no matter which direction the antenna is pointed.  Now I just need to source a cheap USB hard drive to set the DVR back up on my Tablo box.

Edited by dcbc
Posted
1 hour ago, GoldAppleCorps said:

Yep.

<warning_nerditry_follows>

They're also a computing company that basically set the gold standard for extracting and encoding video media. 

Today, running an app that lets you stream live video is common. Back in the Pentium days, when TV streams were analog signals sent over the round black 75-ohm coax cables, watching TV on a computer was instant nerd cred. It took a speedy (for the time) processor and specialized hardware. Hauppauge parlayed their proficiency at designing math co-processors (386 and 486 computers didn't natively know how to process mathematics) into extracting a video stream and encoding into a software file or playing it on the desktop. 

At any respectable nerd's house, the home network will include a NAS (Network Attached Storage - a minifridge or so sized box of hard drives that provides crap-tons of local storage) and a dedicated media server computing machine. The NAS will hold movies, music, what-have-you collected from various sources. The media server will be accessible to watch those movies either at home and, through a properly configured firewall and gateway (likely running pfsense) anywhere else he has a network connection. 

Our esteemed administrator proposes to set up a Hauppauge extractor to take the video signal from source like an antenna, forward the resulting stream to a video program, and stream it with a media server application. He's chosen an open-source (meaning not owned by a for-profit company) program as the media server, so that anyone who wants to can download a completely free app, connect to the stream he's providing, and view the game. As a bonus, that open source app natively supports Chromecast, so if you have the ability to connect your device (like a phone or computer) to a Google Chromecast item, you can watch the game on whatever TV you've chosen.

Love this post. 

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