Throwing money at High Definition problems

Picked up an Athlon X2 64 4200+, along with an Asus M2NPV-VM-CSM mobo to solve the HD problem. In the short term the old box sits in the room on Saint Paul still recording things as a backend. The new system is in the Antec Fusion case as a frontend, i.e. not recording anything. While I kinda feel bad about picking up new hardware, this really was consuming time without a big payback.

With the backend recording box in the back the Digital cable is slightly unhappy as I had to extend the cable to the Videotron box. Some channels now have bad noise problems. I might have to talk to Videotron about that or I might try to put the backend box on top of the fridge, which is already a source of noise, and be pretty much out of the way.

The HDHomeRun is sitting a foot from the antenna, in the skylight, with an extension cord going up the ladder up to there. The idea is to avoid introducing noise along the long cable length but right now it prevents me from seeing if there is any unencrypted QAM (digital cable), which would eliminate the unnecessary digital->analog->digital conversion being done with one of my tuners now.

Keeping noise down is important so that Joan doesn’t miss a show. Cause, if it looks great but cuts an hour show down to 10 minutes because of dropouts (at least it’s efficient - disk space isn’t wasted by dropouts)…

(I hate it when people talk about WAF. This is my hobby, not hers! ;-))

The only thing left on the front end is getting the digital sound output bracket and then seeing if it works.  Unfortunately I’m going to have to order it.

I also installed Knoppmyth R5E50 on the frontend, why not, it’s got a couple of things like Democracy and a couple of other things well integrated and the version I’d done from SVN was a bit flakey.  I haven’t done it yet on the backend as I need to figure out whether to eliminate the backend box or not.

HD looks great by the way.