[MEncoder-users] tv tuner card suggestions?

[Scott W. Larson]

Rich Felker wrote:
> "Outside the market" is irrelevant if someone has the expectation of
> being able to receive it (because they could with analog) and then is
> unable to.

To that customer perhaps but it's not irrelevant to the FCC. Their policy
is that if you're receiving an out-of-market signal today, there is no
guarantee that you'll receive it tomorrow. For example, the FCC regularly
licenses new local FM stations on frequencies that some people receive
out-of-market stations. The expectation of out-of-market reception is just
not a factor in FCC decision making.

Several years ago a guy on the AVS Forum was comparing his NTSC and ATSC
reception of a distant station and ATSC was the clear winner. It was
impossible to read the phone number on the screen in the snowy analog
screen shot but it was perfectly clear in the ATSC screen shot. There have
been no cases where people have gotten acceptable analog reception but
poor digital reception when stations transmit digital at full-power.
Distance isn't really the problem with ATSC.

Multipath on the other hand is still a serious problem since people have
either gotten used to watching terrible analog reception with ghosts and
shaky horizontal sync or have given up and subscribed to cable. Fourth and
fifth generation ATSC receivers have mostly solved this problem. You can
see how bad the multipath is at my urban location in this screenshot:

http://home.pacifier.com/~scowl/hdtv/kgwntsc.jpg

Sadly, that's the best analog reception I can get yet I get perfect
reception (yes, using mplayer!) with no packet errors from the station's
ATSC signal. I'm sure there are similar success stories with DVB-T.