TV pendulum swings back

A lot has happened since my last post on our TV situation. The condensed version:

  • Got an Acer Revo 3610 as the main video source in the living room.
  • Added an ATI Theatre HD 750 USB TV tuner.
  • Added an HP USB TV tuner in an unsuccessful attempt to solve a problem.
  • Lost the Basic cable channels that we had been getting for free.
  • Signed up for Dish Network service.

The Revo has 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium installed and comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. The Windows MCE app works well and includes tv listings for free. Netflix and Hulu streaming are nearly perfect. This wasn’t a painless exercise, but I didn’t expect it to be. There was lots of driver updating and an OS reload or two and the usual Windows crap to deal with. The end result was really good, but there were still three issues.

First, the internal WiFi antenna on the Revo is crap. Trying to stream any internet video was hit-or-miss. I had an old Linksys WRT54GS laying around, so I configured it as a wireless bridge using the DD-WRT firmware and cabled it to the Revo. Network bandwidth problem solved.

The other two issues were not show stoppers, just annoying. When turning on the TV and waking the computer, an attempt to watch digital channels (QAM) would result in a MCE video error message which I found out could mean nearly anything. That’s why I bought the HP tuner; a fruitless attempt to solve this problem. After hours of googling I found that the key variable (would never have guessed it) was the HDMI connection to the TV. Simply unplug and replug the cable after every power cycle and all was well. A solution yes, but hardly a good one.

The third issue also involved broadcast cable. Every 15 to 60 seconds there would be a slight hiccup in both picture and sound. Annoying to say the least. This may have coincided with the loss of Basic cable channels, but I can’t say with any certainty. We rarely watched cable channels, so it wasn’t killing us.

In the meantime, while the wife and I were more than satisfied with the overall scheme of the living room system; the kids were becoming more and more upset. They had nearly exhausted anything of interest to their age group from the Netflix streaming pool and their setup didn’t have a good way to view anything from internet sources. They were missing Disney, HGTV, Food Network, and TLC.

Enter Dish Network. For less than $50 per month they get all the channels they care about plus a DVR. The other two TVs also get all the channels, just no DVR features for now. I can cancel Broadcast cable and reduce the Netflix DVD package to one at a time. That should recoup $15-20. The Revo and the DVD recorder are still in use so only the antenna and the two USB tuners are being wasted.

We went from one extreme to the other and I think we may have found a happy medium. I hope.

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