Will DVB-T work for me?

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OmniouS

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Topic # 25952 7-Sep-2008 19:16

We have a TV Aerial on our roof and it has a splitter attached - one cable goes to the lounge, and another to a bedroom. The cable is labelled 'COLORMAX 75 OHM VHF/FM COAX CABLE'. It doesn't say UHF but Prime and SKY UHF give an excellent picture. Is it possible to rent a Freeview decoder for a short time to confirm that it will work with my setup?

The cable to the lounge conveniently runs right next to my bedroom and I have very easy access to it (my wardrobe leads to an attic). Do I need to buy a special splitter or will any splitter work?

There are no worries with the lounge TV displaying a HD signal but the TV in my room is a 32" CRT that does up to 1080i - would there be an option to output 1080i? It would be through the comp in my sig.

Thanks

eXDee

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Reply # 162920 7-Sep-2008 20:20

Usually if you get good prime/sky uhf reception freeview HD should be fine.
However make sure that your cable is the good RG6 stuff, double shielded, preferably quad shielded. It's quite thick, the thin stuff apparently degrades the signal a lot.

Though a 32"CRT - Any idea what resolution it runs at? It might take a 1080i signal and downstacle it to 576i or something. What kind of inputs?

OmniouS

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Reply # 162930 7-Sep-2008 20:46

It has few sets of standard inputs, taking Component/S-Video/Composite
It also has 2 sets of inputs which are labelled 480p/1080i. These are both Component inputs and one has an RGB input as well.
The TV is a Philips 32PW8808/79R

OmniouS

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Reply # 162932 7-Sep-2008 21:02

Here is a pic of the cable

I won't cut it until tomorrow or else I'd be in for it!

eXDee

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Reply # 162941 7-Sep-2008 21:49

Looks like the good stuff, and you should hopefully be fine. Just remember that splitting the signal pretty much cuts the signal in half (i think?)

OmniouS

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Reply # 162954 7-Sep-2008 22:55

OK Cheers ;)

Ill try a standard splitter to begin with and if that doesn't work, i'll get an amplified one

OmniouS

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Reply # 163176 8-Sep-2008 22:08

Splitter installed without any issues and the picture on the TV's it feeds is excellent.

I'm going to buy a component cable for my PC and test if the TV works properly in 1080i before I buy a tuner.

Something I noticed today though: teletext on the TV in the lounge is quite slow to load some pages now (quick text buttons are still instant - it is just when I type in a page number or when I turn the tv on it takes a while to open the index page). Before putting in the splitter, all pages would load instantly. Would the splitter have caused this or is this just a coincidence and teletext is having probs? The Signal teletext test page looks fine but I'm not really sure what it means.

OmniouS

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Reply # 163377 9-Sep-2008 21:15

The 5m shielded component cable arrived today. I plugged it into my comp and set up dual view and 1080i output for the second screen through the NVidia control panel. The output quality on the TV was better than I expected but the entire picture was shifted to the right about 10-15cm.

I googled around a bit and found out how to get into a service programming mode by entering 0 6 2 5 9 6 then [i+] and there was an option in the menu that came up to adjust horizontal position so that was sorted :) We have 3 different models of Philips TV's in the house and this code worked on all of them. There is a lot of interesting, useful functionality including all standard picture adjustments that are usually found on computer monitors. The TV I 'fixed' had different picture adjustments for 4:3, 16:9 and HD inputs so changing the PC input didn't effect other viewing at all.

A second kind of problem I had was Playing DVD's on the TV using PowerDVD or Win Media Player in Vista. It wouldn't let me unless I switched the output mode to SD because you can't upscale copy protected DVD's over an analog connection (I hadn't experienced this problem before in XP or with my current setup with HDCP LCD connected over DVI) What a load of crap. Installing AnyDVD fixed this problem very quickly.

Just including this info in the hope that someone will find it useful.