Finally getting around to buying a new TiVo. Their specs say they can record ATSC/digital over the air HD.
Do they actually have an internal antenna so that you can get those signals right out of the box, or do you need to buy some sort of external antenna?
Because the signal is digital, no compression has to take place, right? It can just record the digital signal and play it back to you at the same exact quality it received it?
And… I don’t have an HDTV. I may get one, but right now my computer monitor can can display it. Can I transfer an HDTV source over the network to my PC for replaying with the TiVo software?
You’ll need an external antenna that can be aimed. Depending on where you live and what stations you want to receive, you actually may need multiple antennas. My neighborhood requires three antennas of different designs and aimed in three different directions, for example, as our local stations come from San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. All are local Bay Area stations, but they’re all in different directions from here. (Much easier to pay a couple bucks a month and just get them though Dish Network!)
Go to antennaweb.org and plug in your address, and they’ll tell you what kind(s) of antennas to get and what compass headings to aim them to.
I have no idea if Tivo takes the full uncompressed signal and records that, or if it compresses it a bit.
The only way I’m familiar with for moving TV programming across a network is to use a device such as a Slingbox. Unless you have a very lightly used network, don’t expect full uncompressed HD - it’s a whole lot of bits to shuffle around.
Terrestrial digital television in North America is broadcast according to the ATSC standard, and is compressed with the MPEG-2 or (as of July 2008) MPEG-4 codecs. All of the various streams for each channel have to fit into a standard 6 MHz band, so compression is necessary.
Remember there is no such thing as an HD antenna. They use the same type of antenna as analog signals.
Digital TV is compressed, but DISH and Cable further compress signals even more. So when you get digital TV over the air, it has the least amount of compression. If you do a side by side comparison of the three, you will find over the air looks better, but depending on your DISH and cable provider the degree may be almost unoticable to very noticable.
High Def TV isn’t noticable to a human eye if you have under a 30" screen. You can get an HDTV but it’s a waste of money.
Remember all HDTV is digital but not all digital is HDTV. If the station isn’t broadcasting in high def you won’t get it.
Read carefuly and don’t pay more for something you aren’t getting or won’t be able to see
Analog OTA broadcasts have to be digitized and compressed, which is what old Tivos did. Actually, they don’t really have to be compressed, except that you’d get about 1 hour of recording out of a 100 GB hard-drive if you didn’t. But they had an onboard encoder that did all that in one pass. Digital broadcasts are already compressed at the source. Further compression of an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stream is computationally intensive (and expensive), and pretty much unneccesary at the consumer level, since all it does is save you some disk space. Digital-only DVRs are actually cheaper to manufacture than analog, since they don’t have to do any encoding or compressing. Cable and satellite companies do it at the source because it saves them bandwidth, which is a much more precious and rare commodity.