I went Digital!

Finally, I'm on a two week holiday working :) I expect most of my work to be done from home for the next two weeks and so decided I need some quality TV time to relax myself once in a while.

Hence I made sure to pay up front and order CBN Sat, before I went on holiday. This morning I got a call from CBN, notifying me that the Cable Guy was coming for a visit! I was somewhat disappointed when the guy turned up a bit late and looking nothing like the "Cable guy" but was soon excited after seeing the dish and the settop decoder. CBN being the first satellite based DVB cable provider in Sri Lanka, I was quite excited to see how it would look once hooked up to my TV card.

Installation took about a good 2 hours for the cable guys (did I mention two of came?), to mount the dish at 45' east, so that it was high enough to by pass our mango tree that was at line of sight, and get the optimum signal strength/quality possible. Finally they stretched a long coaxial to my room that went into the decoder unit and an S-video cable which I had lying around to my recently bought TV card.

The quality, tough not as great as watching on a real TV set, perhaps due to less than ideal capture capabilities of a cheap TV tuner card, was nevertheless acceptable. I watched TV using one of best FOSS TV viewing application called tvtime. I also got it working in mythTV but the quality wasn't as good since it was caching the video by encoding it before playing, so as to allow for live TV pause functionality.

Anyway for now its all good. Now the only problem is finding time to watch TV. Next on my list is to setup VLC so I can watch TV while I work in my computer/office room.

More on that later....

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