Freeview|HD free assessement! Drop in and see us with your computer and we’ll let you know what you need to get Freeview|HD running on it

How to get Freeview|HD on your computer

Freeview on your computer can be an extremely powerful solution, offering features such as the ability to pause and rewind live TV, and record one channel while watching another, all in stunning HD quality. You can use an existing computer and add parts to it, or we can custom build a dedicated Home Theatre PC solution for you. If you want to get Freeview on your existing computer, it can be a difficult task and there are quite a few gotchas that can trip people up, so this article will try to explain all the options available and how to set it up.

We will focus on getting the terrestrial service Freeview|HD working, however if you are outside the coverage area then you can still get the Freeview Satellite service which will be discussed later. To check if you are in the Freeview|HD coverage area have a look here http://www.freeviewnz.tv/all_about_freeview/coverage

Reception

The first step in getting Freeview|HD is obviously receiving the signal. You will need a UHF aerial on your roof, which most people already have. It is sometimes possible to use an indoor antenna but in most cases they don’t really cut it. A good guide for determining if you are getting a good enough signal is to check how well you can view the old analogue signal for PRIME TV. If you get an OK picture, then you should be able to get Freeview|HD fine.

The next step is getting the signal into your computer, and for this you  will need a TV tuner card. The type of card you need is what’s called a DVB-T card. That stands for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial. Terrestrial means its broadcast from an antenna on the ground such as Sugarloaf on the Port Hills in Christchurch (as opposed to a satellite signal).
There’s quite a few options for TV cards out there (different brands, single /  dual tuners etc) so we’ll try and keep it simple and make some recommendations.

A good product is the Hauppauge HVR 2200. This is a card that goes inside your computer (a free PCI-Express slot is required, check out our free Freeview|HD PC assessment), and is a dual tuner card, which means you can watch one channel and record another at the same time.

Another good option is the HDHomeRun, which is very similar except instead of going inside your PC, it is a separate box that plugs into your network which allows multiple PCs to share it.

You can also get a USB tuner which plugs in like a pen drive, for example the Genius TVGo DVB-T03 USB Digital TV Tuner, which is nice cheap solution for laptop users. Bare in mind however it has no BDA drivers like the other tuners do, which allows applications like Windows Media Centre to use the card.

See here for a list of TV tuner cards.

Software

Once your computer is capable of receiving the Freeview|HD signal with a tuner installed, the next challenge is being able to display it and this is an area that trips a lot of people up. You need software that is able to control a DVB-T card and tune in channels with it. Most cards come with software that can do this fine, but its generally not a very elegant solution, and doesn’t provide with you with a very good experience if you want the ability to kick back on the couch and use a remote control to control everything.

Generally the best experience comes from using Windows Media Centre. However the Media Centre that comes with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate won’t work. Why? Its all to do with the way that Freeview|HD is encoded. Basically that’s the way that Freeview data is compressed so that it can be transmitted to your house, where your Freeview receiver needs to decode (or uncompress it) so it can be displayed. Freeview is encoded using H.264, which is the same encoding that Blueray Discs use, and Vista Media Centre does not know how to decode it. So while Media Centre will scan in the channels no problem, it won’t be able to display the picture.

So what software options are there? Well as mentioned previously, most Freeview tuners come with software that will do the job, but aren’t the best solution available. Another option is a 3rd party media application such as Media Portal, which is an open source community-developed program that has many bells and whistles and is fully capable of working with Freeview. But as is the nature of these sorts of applications, while they are an excellent solution in the hands of a technically competent person, they can be difficult to setup and configure, and can be prone to bugs and glitches which the average user may find frustrating and detract from the enjoyment of what you can achieve with Freeview on your computer. Our recommendation? Use the Windows Media Centre that comes with Windows 7.

The Media Centre included in Windows 7 is compatible with both forms  of Freeview, and provides an excellent experience. We have it running in our showroom so if you want to see what its all about, feel free to drop in and have a look.

Hardware Requirements

Now that we have the tuner card and the software out of the way, we need to talk about whether your computer has the power to run Freeview|HD, as it requires quite a bit of grunt. Its the real-time H.264 decoding that requires the power, and you either need a powerful CPU, or for best results, a graphics card that is capable of decoding H.264, which basically any modern graphics card is designed to do.

Cards from ATI that support it will say they have UVD Video, cards from Nvidia have PureVideo, and Intel graphics chips have ClearVideo. They all mean the same thing, and that is that they are capable of providing hardware accelerated decoding of H.264. This means the graphics card  does all the work, relieving your CPU of the workload and allowing it to do other things.

If you don’t have a supported graphics card, for example alot of laptops don’t have powerful graphics, then as long as you have at least a dual core CPU, you should be OK, but for best picture quality and stutter-free video it is recommended to have a suitable graphics card. Some motherboards now have suitable onboard graphics that are fully capapble of providing hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 and also provide HDMI output.

Multiroom Solutions

If you want this solution running in other rooms, there are a couple of options, the first of which is to have a another Home Theatre PC running in the other rooms. The computers can share content such as recorded TV over the network by either sharing folders with each other (Windows 7 HomeGroup feature makes this really easy), or you can have your recorded TV stored centrally on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, or on a Windows Home Server. The HDHomeRun tuner mentioned above allows all PCs in the house to share it, and if 2 tuners are not enough then you can add more HDHomeRun units into your network to add more tuners that can be used simultaneously.

Another option is to use extenders, the best of which is the Xbox 360. These devices extend Windows Media Centre from your computer, over the network to another TV. This means you get the same experience on both the computer and the extender, and they share the tuners in the PC.

Freeview Satellite

If you are out of the Freeview|HD coverage area, then the Freeview Satellite service may be an option for you as it has full nationwide coverage. The major difference with satellite as opposed to the terrestrial HD service, is that you need to have a satellite dish on your roof, which needs to plug into a satellite TV tuner card (DVB-S) in your computer (for example a Hauppauge NOVA-S-Plus card). If you already have a Sky dish on your roof, you can usually use that as both  Freeview and Sky TV are transmitted from the same satellite (Optus D1).

The other major difference is that the satellite service is not High Definition (HD), but is instead broadcast in Standard Definition (SD), which is similar in quality to a DVD. Unless you have a TV over about 40 inches in size, most people find SD looks fine. SD doesn’t have the same hardware requirements as HD, basically any PC can handle it as its uses MPEG2 as opposed to MPEG4 and H.264. Most satellite TV cards are only single tuners too, so if you want to record one channel while watching another, you will likely need to have 2 satellite cards installed.

Electronic Program Guide (EPG)

One of the most powerful aspects of Freeview on the computer is the ability to schedule your favourite shows to record. The use of an EPG makes this easier as you can search for the program you want and set it to record. The EPG also gives you information about the show you are currently watching.

The EPG is transmitted over the air with each channel, so your computer can read it via your TV card. The satellite service uses EIT data for its EPG, and computers can read and display the full 8 day EPG.

The terrestrial HD service however uses a new format called MHEG5, which includes not only the EPG data, but also the user interface for the EPG that you see on all Freeview|HD boxes. This poses a problem for computers as they already have their own interface (e.g. Media Centre), and most HTPC applications like this don’t support extracting just the data for the EPG from the MHEG5 stream. The terrestrial service also transmits some data in EIT, which is what Media Centre uses, but it only shows the EPG information for the next few hours. The downside to this is it makes it a bit more difficult to schedule recordings that are a few days out for example.

There are ways around this, such as importing an XML file into Media Centre that gets downloaded every day from the internet with the full EPG. Tools such as the Big Screen EPG (BSE) can do this, Google has lots of information about it.

Come in and see us about your HTPC needs

If all this is a bit much, or you’re interested in getting Freeview working on your computer, come in and see us. We offer a free Freeview|HD assessment of your existing computer, plus we also custom build Home Theatre PCs and are happy to give you a quote.

Remember HTPCs have another great features too, like acting as a Jukebox for all your music, playing slideshows of your photo collections, or for storing home videos and / or your movie collection.