Hello, everyone. I am a new member who has followed Barney over here from another Forum. I am a charter subscriber to DirecTV and an early adopter of the Hughes HD TiVo. We have the maximum Total Choice Premier package with Sports and HD, three satellite boxes, two D* TiVo boxes, one HD and one standard. We also have a stand alone Sony HD-200 tuner. We have a whole house video network with nine televisions (two HD), driven by a Winegard antenna and 25 db line amp, distribution and filter, and a triple LNB dish with a Terk 5x8 cascaded multiswitch. We use two dual strands of Belden RG-6 cable dropped to each room, with one more strand at hub locations to drive the modulator backfeed for the network and for multiple boxes.
We are in the Dallas, Texas local market area and we are a Nielsen family for OTA and TiVo, so our viewing habits count for a lot of families.
I am retired and so spend way too much time messing with home theater and video hobbies.
Right now I am irritated with DirecTV's compression of our HD channels and what we perceive to be a decline in D* quality, but D* is still the better option among bad choices in this market (ComCast cable and DISH available here) so we are sticking with it, reluctantly. I have followed the hysterical rumor and agitated discussion of all the things D* is supposedly going to do at any moment, but my local suppliers have no equipment or shipping schedule, no training schedule and no MPEG 4 implementation info, and we have heard nothing either about new equipment or anything else. Because we get excellent OTA HD here in our market, I could care less about D*'s rebroadcast of local channels, but we really, really want more HD, particularly TNT and ESPN 2, along with the movie channels.
Therefore, we do regard all this talk as speculation, and we figure that D* will do this like they do everything else, late and badly.
There seems to be a lot of knowledge here and I thank you guys for all the good info I have gotten from reading your posts.
I hope to be a respectful member and to contribute when I can. I am pretty good with D* systems, home theater, and my neighbor is a TI research engineer who works on DLP technology, so I occasionally get some gems from him.
Except for being a Neilsen family, we are fairly typical TV nuts with the benefit of having built a house in the last five years and so finally having it wired properly.
That's about it. Thanks for letting me participate here!
We are in the Dallas, Texas local market area and we are a Nielsen family for OTA and TiVo, so our viewing habits count for a lot of families.
I am retired and so spend way too much time messing with home theater and video hobbies.
Right now I am irritated with DirecTV's compression of our HD channels and what we perceive to be a decline in D* quality, but D* is still the better option among bad choices in this market (ComCast cable and DISH available here) so we are sticking with it, reluctantly. I have followed the hysterical rumor and agitated discussion of all the things D* is supposedly going to do at any moment, but my local suppliers have no equipment or shipping schedule, no training schedule and no MPEG 4 implementation info, and we have heard nothing either about new equipment or anything else. Because we get excellent OTA HD here in our market, I could care less about D*'s rebroadcast of local channels, but we really, really want more HD, particularly TNT and ESPN 2, along with the movie channels.
Therefore, we do regard all this talk as speculation, and we figure that D* will do this like they do everything else, late and badly.
There seems to be a lot of knowledge here and I thank you guys for all the good info I have gotten from reading your posts.
I hope to be a respectful member and to contribute when I can. I am pretty good with D* systems, home theater, and my neighbor is a TI research engineer who works on DLP technology, so I occasionally get some gems from him.
Except for being a Neilsen family, we are fairly typical TV nuts with the benefit of having built a house in the last five years and so finally having it wired properly.
That's about it. Thanks for letting me participate here!
