United States of America
First of all, I'd like to thank everybody involved with Mediaportal for an absolutely splendid piece of work! You should be very proud of the work you all have done so far! I discovered this wonderful program whilst struggling with an ATI TV Wonder Pro 650 and their awful software that kept crashing, locking up an XP machine and worked so badly I thought I had a defective card. Turns out that it was CMC and its services that are completely hosed once I got Mediaportal installed and the ATI trash off my machine. *THANK YOU!*
I live about three miles away from the transmitters, using ATSC digital on the ATI card and it just didn't work. Since I'm in an area with a lot of trees and foliage, the reception is pretty poor even so close to the TV transmitters. But worse than the awful reception is the variable reception throughout the year as a result of foliage changes here in upstate New York near Canada. This phenomenon requires frequent reorientation of the antenna throughout the year as foliage comes and goes, and often the best signal on any given channel can be 180 degrees around the compass depending on multipath and other signal degradations. Thus, the antenna has to be moved quite often and some signals come in, others don't and it requires trial and error on regular television to "tweak it up" to receive stations.
Naturally with ATSC digital, you cannot change channels and watch the analog signals fluctuate in real time in order to point the antenna since the signals are either above threshhold and present, or under threshhold and absent. And the ATI card has an annoying habit of crashing the computer if the signals aren't just right and recaptured pretty quickly if lost.
So I'm wondering if there is any way to be able to provide (as a selection) those nice signal strength and signal quality bars found in the configuration's scanning screen and make them available in "normal viewing mode" either based upon whatever channel is selected for viewing, or in the alternative the ability to select an actual channel number (rather than going through an entire scan sequence) so as to be able to "peak" the antenna to provide the strongest signal quickly and see where that peak signal occurs as it is rotated? That'd be a *very* handy feature.
In the alternative, if there is some way I can code up a plugin or such to do that using the existing code, I'm an ANSI C programmer if that's at all possible however I think it would be a *very* useful feature to the main program itself for people in a similar situation as myself where "now you have the signal, now you don't, kee-rash!" The time that it takes for the configuration to do the "whole range scan" is pretty long and the trial and error method has taken days so far. Thought I had my channels, but within a day, half have vanished on me already because of foliage and weather changes to reception out here in the woods ...
I live about three miles away from the transmitters, using ATSC digital on the ATI card and it just didn't work. Since I'm in an area with a lot of trees and foliage, the reception is pretty poor even so close to the TV transmitters. But worse than the awful reception is the variable reception throughout the year as a result of foliage changes here in upstate New York near Canada. This phenomenon requires frequent reorientation of the antenna throughout the year as foliage comes and goes, and often the best signal on any given channel can be 180 degrees around the compass depending on multipath and other signal degradations. Thus, the antenna has to be moved quite often and some signals come in, others don't and it requires trial and error on regular television to "tweak it up" to receive stations.
Naturally with ATSC digital, you cannot change channels and watch the analog signals fluctuate in real time in order to point the antenna since the signals are either above threshhold and present, or under threshhold and absent. And the ATI card has an annoying habit of crashing the computer if the signals aren't just right and recaptured pretty quickly if lost.
So I'm wondering if there is any way to be able to provide (as a selection) those nice signal strength and signal quality bars found in the configuration's scanning screen and make them available in "normal viewing mode" either based upon whatever channel is selected for viewing, or in the alternative the ability to select an actual channel number (rather than going through an entire scan sequence) so as to be able to "peak" the antenna to provide the strongest signal quickly and see where that peak signal occurs as it is rotated? That'd be a *very* handy feature.
In the alternative, if there is some way I can code up a plugin or such to do that using the existing code, I'm an ANSI C programmer if that's at all possible however I think it would be a *very* useful feature to the main program itself for people in a similar situation as myself where "now you have the signal, now you don't, kee-rash!" The time that it takes for the configuration to do the "whole range scan" is pretty long and the trial and error method has taken days so far. Thought I had my channels, but within a day, half have vanished on me already because of foliage and weather changes to reception out here in the woods ...
