TiVos for HD OTA in Canada

[tenstu]

Yep - I was afraid of the cable issue.... I am sorry to say that I am not sure how you could combine the two guide data sets... Shoot!!

[Wayne]

tentsu - You're right about entering the US zip code but you shouldn't have to do this. In fact, I think I did something similar when I set up the OTA tuner for SageTV a few months ago. Zap2it and other sites have Canadian lineup data for cable, satellite and OTA analog. It is about time that they recognized that we have OTA digital here in Canada! And it is not an issue of not having the channel data since all of these channels are available on cable and sat so they have that data. It is only an issue of having a database of what digital OTA channels are available in each city.

Chudsmith - The ideal situation would be if you could manually input the channels on the TiVo or do a channel scan. That way you might be able to use both cable and OTA. Manually inputting the channels is sometimes confusing with OTA digital but it is not too bad to figure out if you have a list of channels available in the GTA (which is readily available). But I am not sure if TiVo lets you do this. You might want to ask on some TiVo forums.

The other option is to build an HTPC with an OTA digital tuner and a analog tuner hooked up to analog cable (or even your digital cable box). You can do this with Vista Media Center and XP MCE (with a minor hack) or with other PVR software such as SageTV, Myth, BeyondTV, etc. I have a setup like this using SageTV with three tuners - an OTA tuner, an HD-PVR for HD cable hooked up to an HD cable box and an analog tuner (PVR-150) hooked up to my SD cable box. It is initially more expensive, more complex and it requires a PC by your TV but it is, by far, the most flexible solution. Unlike TiVo it also does not incur a monthly fee so it might actually be cheaper in the long run.

[tenstu]

Wayne - be careful advising people to use Vista with the Canadian OTA hack. The new TV Pack will kill it and disable ATSC for Canada. Pete Near has a good post on this on the MCE forum. I advise ALL people now who *must* use windows based computer a PVR to abandon Microsoft and go to SageTV or others.

[Wayne]

Originally Posted by tenstu

Wayne - be careful advising people to use Vista with the Canadian OTA hack. The new TV Pack will kill it and disable ATSC for Canada. Pete Near has a good post on this on the MCE forum. I advise ALL people now who *must* use windows based computer a PVR to abandon Microsoft and go to SageTV or others.

You're right that the TV Pack will disable ATSC in Canada but I believe that the only way to buy a PC with the TV pack is to buy it from a specialized HTPC OEM company - this "upgrade" will NOT be available to the general public - which has caused a bit of an outcry in the Windows Media Center world.

If you already have a PC with Vista HP then trying your PC out as a digital OTA PVR is pretty cheap as all you need is a digital OTA tuner and you can generally buy them for $50-$75. And it isn't too hard to set this up within Vista Media Center.

This is one of the reasons that I am transitioning from Windows Media Center, albeit XP MCE, to SageTV along with lack of non-OTA HD and DRM issues.

[Chudsmith]

thanks again guys. Unfortunately my computer is way to old and slow to use as a media centre. I think I'll try talking to someone at Tivo. If I find anything more useful than move to the US I'll post it.

[Wayne]

You actually don't need a very fast PC as the encoding for the SD capture cards is done by the card and for OTA HD there is no encoding required as the tuner card is just storing bits to your hard drive. As long as you can play back Divx files then your PC is likely fast enough. And buying a new PC may be cheaper than getting a TiVo as not only is there the up front fee of $300 plus a monthly fee of $12.95. That makes the 2 year cost about US$600 and you can buy a decent PC for that, assuming that you are hooking it up to an existing HDTV.

And to make the TiVo half decent you would have to expand the hard drive which would cost about another $100.

[pshseek]

Greetings all, So i haven't had much time to experiment but i have a Tivo HD DVR with an analog Rogers cable and a OTA antenna for HD set-up. Within Tivo's guided set-up u must choose between a postal code or a zipcode to continue with set-up. In my case i needed to choose a postal code to download the rogers cable guide.

Now on the OTA side of things, Tivo has made some assumptions on what they believe u can receive via antenna. All the canadian broadcast stations show up in the guide automatically for my postal code. I'm located in Toronto. Here's where it gets strange. The guide gives me a only Buffalo in analog broadcasts. In order for me to include digital Buffalo channels in the guide i need to do a manual channel scan after Tivo's guided setup is complete. Then add the new channels to the guide. Which is fine but the digital Buffalo channels won't show any guide info. All it says for them is "No Info Available".

I haven't gone much further than this except to include the channel info for the Buffalo digitals in the guide via the Rogers analog list. You can add and delete channels that Tivo gives manually. Hope this helps.

[faston]

pshseek, since you chose a postal code to get the Canadian listings, are you getting guide info for the OTA channels? I was not getting any Canadian OTA guide info, so I ended up putting in an American Zip code (Point Roberts) which, ironically contains all the guide info for the Canadian OTA channels that you don't get if you put in a Postal Code. I have deleted all the channels from the Point Roberts cable system and am using the Tivo as basically a 3 channel OTA PVR and use my Shaw box for the rest of the channels.

I have not heard that they have added guide data for Canadian OTA stations if you enter a postal code, but if they have, I'll quickly change it back to Postal Code (and be extremely happy!).

[pshseek]

Perhaps this is a recent addition to the Tivo channel listings they add to your local lineup according to your postal code. But that's all i did was enter a postal code to obtain my local analog cable channel listings for Rogers, I'm probably a small handful of analog only Rogers customers left, and since i told the Tivo i was hooking up an antenna also, up popped all my OTA locals as well. I reckon they'll be more changes to Tivo's way of doing the channel lineups once the American analog shutdown happens. Has anyone out there heard for a fact that Digital broadcasting stations in the U.S. will boost their signal strengths after Feb in order to reach more homes? Will we see a rise in signal strength based purely on no more analog signals flying about? Has anyone heard of any particular Network stations' plans particularly in the Buffalo/Toronto area?

[classicsat]

All of the HD TiVo models will tune and record ATSC channels at the received resolution and compression, and play them back as they were received, including HD channels.

[faston]

Originally Posted by pshseek

i told the Tivo i was hooking up an antenna also, up popped all my OTA locals as well.

Ok, just to be clear; Canadian Postal Code and Canadian OTA channels with guide information? If that is the case, this is huge (for me), but I don't want to go through the whole guided setup routine if nothing has actually changed.

Thanks

[pshseek]

Here is a complete list of OTA digital channels that i get guide info for from Tivo:

CBC
CTV
CHCH
PBS
CW23
CITS
GLOBAL
CITYTV

Here are the digital channels that i manually scan for then add to the guide list:

NBC
CBS
ABC
FOX
OMNI1
OMNI2
WB49
SUNTV

These digital channels have no guide info listed but the american channels get guide info from Tivo on the analog equivalent. What i do is list both analog and digital in the guide to see what's on then choose the digital channel to watch or record. It's strange i know but i'm hoping this changes next Feb. For Omni's and Suntv i need to list the analog cable equivalent which isn't listed right above in the guide list making it a bit more difficult to first see what's on then watch the digital channel. I hope this makes sense and helps.

[faston]

That's great! Thanks. Guess it's time for another 'guided setup' for me.

[faston]

Well, pshseek is right. Did a new guided setup and put in my Canadian Postal code and everything came up correctly. All Shaw analog cable channels and all Canadian OTA HD with guide data. Don't know when this happened, but it's great (not that I am interested in recording many lo-def shows off the analog channels, but it's nice to have).

As the pioneer of Tivo HD OTA in Canada, I wonder if Dajak knows about this. Are you out there Dajak?

[stampeder]

Dajad left us last year, but he might be reading. I think he still blogs about Tivos in Canada.