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.
Posts Categorised: TV
0BBC HD to become BBC2 HD
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.
0Broken Fonera ruins Freeview reception
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
2Designing a Home Theatre Room & Lounge
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!
4Copy files from Humax PVR 9200T to PC
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.
Update Apr 2024
Mike’s site is still up but the link to HumaxPVR.zip that he offered is now dead.
I found a copy of Humax Media Controller with Mike’s driver added that I downloaded and e‑mailed to someone around 14 years ago still intact in my old gmail and have now rescued it.
You can download it directly here
0BBC 1 HD and ITV 1 HD
A quick update on getting BBC 1 HD and ITV 1 HD in Media Center via freesat. A full transponder scan will reveal these channels now on channels in the 1270’s. In some cases 1270 and 1271, or in my case 1272 and 1273!
… Read Full Article
0ITV-HD as a proper channel
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.
… Read Full Article
3ATI BBC HD Fix!
Further to my post yesterday, I discovered, via Nigel Dessau’s blog (closed by AMD since this article was published), that ATI will be releasing a fix for this issue in the Catalyst 10.2 (February 2010) release. This is fantastic news, thank you ATI!
… Read Full Article
0Update on BBC HD / ATI corruption issues
Just a quick update on a[intlink id=“34” type=“post”]previous post[/intlink] about problems with BBC HD in Windows 7 Media Center when using ATI video cards.
… Read Full Article
0A temporary workaround for the ATI / 7MC / BBC-HD problems
-update-
This issue has now been fixed by a driver update from ati. For more info see the [intlink id=“48” type=“post”]latest article[/intlink] on the issue
… Read Full Article
“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”