Question about Walmart $35 DVR

[digitalfreaknyc]

that looks like the one i have
in my case, it seems to have a stronger tuner/receiver than my TV,
there have been instances where, i could get a signal lock on a particular channel with the PVR, when the TV tuner would not keep a lock on the signal
i would be watching, not wanting to record , using the TV and have problems, out of frustration i would switch to the PVR for comparison and get a lock and finish watching the show

could be you have a really good tuner in the TV, or just got a PVR with weaker than avg tuner ?

Yeah, it's really weird. The TV was my old Samsung plasma. It's probably 7 years old. I had really strong signal from most NYC channels and then plugged that tuner/receiver in and had trouble receiving certain channels that were perfect before. Luckily, I don't use it a ton so it doesn't matter...but it still sucks.

[KarMa]

thanks theewizard - excellent results with MPEG2 video, AC3 audio, 59.94fps, 720p.
Just wondering though -- the first one was 15.1 MBS; the second one was 10.1MBS. No way to adjust bitrate, true? How can this significant difference be explained? Was there a decipherable difference in video quality?

so it's just a matter of plugging in the USB drive, pressing a record on the remote, and that's it for OTA recording? No antennae?

Anymore many channels can be broadcast on a single frequency. So when they do that, all the channels have to share the limited bandwith. There's a religious channel nearby that puts 6 SD channels on a single frequency, looks bad but they don't care. My local HD NBC channel went from 15Mbps for the main HD channel to 11MBps for the main HD channel, when 2 SD channels were added on the same frequency.

[godai]

i curious about that here where l live , i see in one frecuency, 4 channels, 2 1080 i hd channels and 2 sd, usually its only one hd and others sd.

[KarMa]

i curious about that here where l live , i see in one frecuency, 4 channels, 2 1080 i hd channels and 2 sd, usually its only one hd and others sd.

According to wikipedia, after you account for overhead a single frequency can carry ~18.3 Mbit/s of actual video data on the ATSC system. So if you give each 1080i channel 7-8Mbit, and then the remainder to the SD channel it can work but would not be great. They are probably using an adaptive bitrate between all the channels. So the channel with a more demanding content will be allotted more than the other channels, making better use of the limited bandwidth. I've seen this behavior with one of my local stations.