HDTV and Home Theater Podcast #265 - Digital Converter Boxes, a clarification — Community

#1 Apr 8, 2008 at 6:58 am

As most of us know the big transition from analog to digital television in the US will happen in less than a year. Either the public service announcements are starting to work, or people are just finally starting to pay attention, but our inbox is filling up with questions. We tried to cover the whole issue back in <a href="http://www.htguys.com/archive/2008/March11.html">Episode 257</a>, but we must have left out some crucial details because the email keeps coming. We'll probably need to do this again in the future, but let's see if we can clarify things a little better.

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#2 Apr 8, 2008 at 6:32 pm

Don't forget that many HDTV sets were sold without an ATSC tuner, so for many it would make sense to buy one of the ATSC set top tuners that DO output HD for their sets. I had one of these for a short period of time and it worked pretty well. It even put together a quide from the PSIP information being transmitted by the OTA stations. I expect these to become more common and hopefully cheaper as well.

Apparently you may not be able to redeem a coupon to subsidize the cost, but we aren't talking about a lot of money here. Many people may be surprised to find multicast programming for the first time. You won't find those on any other medium. While I don't like the bandwidth robbing of the HD programs, it is nice to have a live radar image to reference, or recent local news at any time of the day.

#3 Apr 9, 2008 at 2:53 pm

My cable company carries all of the local over the air DTV, including subchannels-all you need is a QAM tuner. If you only use their cable box, you only get the main channel.