Jason-Saggers.com

Archive for the ‘Digital TV’ Category

Channel 7 (prime) are set to launch a new channel called 7mate which is a male orientated channel set to launch on the 25th of September.

A quick video below shows some of the line up.

The first broadcast television channel to cater for men 16-49.

Some of the line up according to prime is the Family Guy, American dad, 30 rock, how I met your mother, That 70′s how, scrubs, Caprica, Stargate Atlantis, warehouse 13, fifth gear, the universe, life after people, the boneyard and many others including first run big movies for the blokes such as strangers and primeval.

Sounds quiet good to me.

After only 3 airings of Stargate Universe Channel 10 has decided to can it.
I went to watch and record it on Monday night but then I looked at the EPG and The Siege was on in it’s place which I was not happy about.
The first thing that went through my mind was they have canned it.

My partner done some digging around and found that was the case, she also found that prime might be adding it to there new 7TWO on prime channel since they currently air Stargate Atlantis on Thursday nights (lets hope they keep it that way)
Not happy Jan

Well here is the rest of the IT/Multimedia items that I have.

A small USB based DVB-T stick by the guys a Pinnacle.

A V-gear PCI based firewire card, not sure what model.

The is snazzi capture card number 2. Has dual composite, audio in, s-video and 2 firewire ports.

The is snazzi capture card number 3. Has dual composite, audio in, s-video and 2 firewire ports (same as above but with much different packaged software)

This is a web camera that is worth around the $120AU mark but I have seen $20 web cams that work better that have much better picture quality.

This one my first V-gear web cam, has a glass lens and is terrible with low light situations.

This is a 5.25″ drive bay box that connects to products like the V-gear Speed TV PCI card, or it connects to any capture card with composite, s-video and firewire, also has an RF sensor and a mic input on it.

The last item for now is a wireless skype phone that works very well on my Vista home premium 64bit desktop system and enables you to fully control skype (well the main features any way) since i am not really a skype user this phone isn’t used any more.

Well that is it for now, hope you enjoy looking at the pictures I have taken about the Multimedia products that I own, I know I dont use most of the items but they are nice to look at and remember what was

I use to work with TV tuners for a living and really enjoy it but now I don’t which is fine, but i don’t keep track of it all so much any more, mainly because it has died off in my opinion

Here is a different post relating to the multimedia items that I have for computers, TV tuners, capture cards, FM tuners and other things I didn’t even know I owned

An early V-Gear PCI DVB-T card, works fine but good luck getting newer drivers or even 64bit drivers.

USB net radion device, problem is that it is based on activeX so it needs internet explorer installed.

An older lifeview DVB-T stick, TV Walker twin.

Speed TV which is a basic Analogue PCI TV tuner, works well with the video bay which I forgot to include in this line up.

One of the nice snazzi capture cards with dual composite inputs, firewire and s-video, I would still be using this card instead of my dvd maker 2 if I could get 64bit drivers for it

LR820t2a2 which is a dual digital and dual analogue capture device, the hardware is great but the drivers and viewing software are very old now.

LR306n, one of the better PCI hybrid card, I used this product for quiet some time.

This is the very hot running LR306 unit, not to be confused with the LR306n unit, with this card you can watch both the analogue and digital channels at once.

A lifeview voip box that I never used, i personally never found the point of such a unit.

This is an unknown Lifeview DVB-T stick that uses the Trident chipset (TM6000 or there abouts)

The LR860 triple card. This is a PCI-e X1 card with satellite, dual digital, dual analogue and video inputs.

LR822T2A2M, this card is a dual hybrid with hardware encoding for the analogue so that media center doesn’t need a software MCE encoder installed.

LR548, is an analogue USB tv tuner and video capture unit with hardware decoding and quiet a loud cooling fan built in.

LR524tam, this is a single hybrid unit with hardware encoding, I actually tested this card under 64bit windows 7 and it had lots of problems under Win7 MCE.

An express card with dual digital.

A small low profile card that is analogue only. I think this card has hardware encoding.

A basic USB FM tuner with very strange software.

An express slot hybrid unit with component, s-video and composite inputs, with a very large antennae and a very small antennae.

This is a dual DVB-T digital USB stick that I currently use on my New acer laptop, enables you to watch 2 channels at once or watch one channel and record another, also has a built in signal detector.

This is just a USB based satellite USB receiver, used to pickup all the foreign channels.

A USB composite and s-video capture unit that comes with cyberlinks power director and power director.

PE210SE dual digital DVB-T card that is PCI-e X1

An older DVB-T card bus product.

A DAB+ usb stick that is a little ahead of its time here in Australia

Portable power goodness…
I use this unit as back up power for my ipod, Nokia 6300, Digital Camera and my nintendo DS unit and it works very well.

Well that is it for now, Would you believe that I have being to post this for a few weeks now, still isn’t showing how I actually won’t it to display.

Looks like the HD scenery channels are now gone.

The TEN HD channel is now the ONE HD 24/7 Sports channel and the WIN HD channel is about to become the new GO channel and the PRIME HD channel just seems to be the same as the other 4 PRIME TV channels.

As you can see even though the Go channel isn’t online till the 8th of August MCE picks it up fine as well as ONE HD and a rescan wasn’t needed.

That was just a quick update.

So the 3 scenery channels or demo loops as most of use called them have been replaced with or will be replaced with the new channels etc.

Well the One HD channel has been live since the 2nd of July now here in Canberra.

I have left it for a while because I have been monitoring the new channel.

The EPG works perfectly on that channel and there has been quiet a mixture of items to watch.

As you can see in the image above the EPG works fine in Vista media center with the TV pack 2008 installed.

Also our DVD collection has been increasing.

Yes I know they are large pictures (800×500) but that is life

Horton hears a who is about an elephant that finds a tiny microscopic city which he is trying to protect from his friends who don’t believe what he has found. He has to get the microscopic city to a safe location before something bad happens.

Stars Jim Carrey as Horton, Steve Carrel as the mayor of Whoville, Carol Burnett does the voice of kangaroo and Will Arnett does the voice of vlad, plus many other stars.

The movie it self can get a little drawn out but it is a fun and colourful movie to watch, the animation is top notch and looks amazing on our 108cm plasma in 576i.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

These are the steps that I took to install the Vista MCE update called Media Center TV pack 2008

Note that this update is for the 64bit version of Vista (Home premium and Ultimate) and will only install under an OEM version of Vista

Here is how I installed the TV pack

1. Prepare a machine with a clean install of Vista SP1

2. Install the TV Pack linked to below

• MediaCenterTVPack2008-KB953272-x64 (47.87mb) download here

3. Install the play ready PC runtime

• PlayReadyPC_x64 (1.05mb) download here

4. Install the following updates, the KB950754 then the KB951685

• Windows6.0-KB950754-x64 (1.27mb) download here
• Windows6.0-KB951685-x64 (634.81kb) download here

5. Install any required or recommended updates in windows update

6. Launch media center and go through the set up process

A few new menu items

There was no internet connection so it said it could get the EPG etc information from the TV broadcast

It found my dual digital DVB-T tuner card perfectly

The EPG now fully works with out an internet connection

Teletext on prime TV (digital that is) press the small coloured buttons on the bottom left of the screen to access the teletext as an overlay

That is it for now

Remember that this is only for Vista 64bit OEM versions.