Posts Categorised: TV

0Fix grey letterbox bars on LG Plasma TV

Posted by & filed under Displays.

I have an LG Plasma TV as part of my main HTPC setup.  Although I cal­ib­rated it (and turned off things like dynam­ic con­trast) when I first got it, I have always had an issue with the let­ter­box bars (e.g. on 2.4:1 ratio films) look­ing grey — i.e. being light­er than the darkest parts of the film.  I googled to try to find a solu­tion but was even­tu­ally con­vinced by repeated for­ums that it was just my per­cep­tion and even­tu­ally gave up.

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0BBC HD LogoBBC HD to become BBC2 HD

Posted by & filed under Freesat.

I’ve been a little slow get­ting round to updat­ing con­tent on the site recently, and this news was one item that got left behind.  The BBC have announced that BBC HD is to be replaced by BBC2 HD.  The major­ity of con­tent on BBC HD was from BBC2 any­way, so most will notice little dif­fer­ence, but expect a new logo and minor changes to the pro­gramme line-up.  The expec­ted switchover date is 6am on Tues­day 26th March.

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0fonera simpl2Broken Fonera ruins Freeview reception

Published by & filed under Freeview. Last updated .

For the last 3 days I’ve had ser­i­ous prob­lems receiv­ing Freeview. Until now I’ve had no prob­lems, but as we’d had some very strong winds loc­ally, I thought a likely can­did­ate was the aer­i­al being knocked off align­ment. I car­ried out vari­ous oth­er checks of cables, amp­li­fi­ers etc. and could­n’t find any issues, and con­sequently decided to invest­ig­ate issues with the aer­i­al. I have a large high gain aer­i­al spare, and as I’m cur­rently in ren­ted accom­mod­a­tion I decided to try my aer­i­al in the attic space, rather than attempt­ing to get onto the roof of the house. I lugged my aer­i­al up, and thanks to a com­bin­a­tion of aer­i­als­andtv, google earth, and mega­lith­ia ter­rain was able to line up on the nearest major trans­mit­ter — Emley Moor. I con­nec­ted the aer­i­al dir­ectly to the TV card in my TV serv­er and used my laptop to check that everything was fixed. It was­n’t!… Read Full Article

2Home Theatre RoomDesigning a Home Theatre Room & Lounge

Published by & filed under Misc Audio, Misc TV. Last updated .

I have been look­ing to design a new home theatre room, and research­ing this top­ic has led me to a few pre­lim­in­ary con­clu­sions.  First of all, there are lots of dif­fer­ent ideas out there about home cinema room shapes!

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4Humax PVR-9200TCopy files from Humax PVR 9200T to PC

Published by & filed under Freeview, Misc Media Software. Last updated .

I own a couple of Humax PVT-9200T dual freeview PVRs, both of which are now quite full with recor­ded pro­grams.  Humax have provided a pro­gram called eLinker, but it isn’t very good.  A good altern­at­ive is Humax Media Con­trol­ler but unfor­tu­nately it does­n’t work with Win­dows x64, as Mike Dim­mick explains.  Thank­fully, Mike has also cre­ated a solu­tion by patch­ing some of the files, so that Humax Media Con­trol­ler can now be used suc­cess­fully in Win­dows 7 x64.  The only issue is that Win­dows must be booted with Driver Sign­ing Enforce­ment disabled.

0ITV-HD LogoITV-HD as a proper channel

Published by & filed under Freesat. Last updated .

ITV-HD is finally avail­able as a prop­er chan­nel. For any­one manu­ally tun­ing a freesat box of Media Cen­ter PC you need to add 10832MHz with 22600 ksym­bols on hori­zont­al. 2 extra chan­nels should appear called 10000 and 10001. I can­’t remem­ber the chan­nel num­bers (and I have now renumbered them) but there were between 1000 and 1100 I think.
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