My favorite station - H&I (14-3 in Austin) is transmitting on a new tower due to the conversion (it moved from KXAN to KEYE), and they have it set to 4:3 format - and it should be 16:9 (channel 14-2 Bounce is also this way). At least on the TV, I can override the setting and make it 16:9, and it is formatted correctly.
The apps for HDHomeRun allow for “zoom” (not exactly 16:9) - but Tablo and apps have no fix…
It could take a while to get it all fixed…
but ONLY the .1 are currently using ATSC 3.0. The new stations showed up in my TtanTV Guide, but I hid them. I’m in Austin 78758 zipcode close to YMCA on Rundberg.
KEYE-CD has gone live, but then goes offline - rarely is it broadcasting more than 3-4 hours. KXAN, KVNA and KVVBO were only online for about 5 minutes one time. And the broadcast (while in the new format) are only the HD rebroadcast of the regular ATSC 1.0 channels.
The thing that irked me about the repack was KEYE-TV screwing up H&I (14-3) and Bounce (14-2) - they are sending the format as 4:3 in the metadata, but they are actually 16:9. No one from KEYE or KXAN will respond as to how to fix it…so it shows up super small (very large sidebars).
Some general (not Tablo) ATSC 3.0 news today out of CES 2021
Since Cord Cutters News was sold it’s really sad they censored comments. Now it looks like they passed out a book of marketing buzz words for their selective profit generating…news… articles.
We stand for honor, integrity and truth… “oh, look… money!”
Why would someone be surprised by buzz words.
In the early 2000’s a number of tech firms RIF’ed their inhouse tech writers and went with various forms of outsourced tech writers. Since many of these writers changed quite frequently a list of approved words was developed. Our list had 250 words. This reduced the amount of time R&D had to spend figuring out what a particular writer was talking about.
Of course the side affect was that since these tech writers worked from the actual R&D functional specifications some new R&D words didn’t exactly translate to these 250 words.
And sometimes people get tired of working on the same old product and want to move on. So like WhatsApp and Instagram they sell and move on.
Everybody knew what ATSC 3.0 is going to be …yet no one said we’d get tunes and talk radio along with it.
Once the standard defined how the IP stack works with a Radio Frequency couldn’t just about any other product using TCP tag along.
Or at least I thought the vision for the ATSC 3.0 standard was to allow for just about anything.
Perhaps this thread is stale … and I’m in the wrong place.
But I was looking for a Tablo-like product. What’s driving me at this time, is that the new ATSC 3.0 station in Buffalo might be easier to get a lock on than some of the 1.0 equivalents.
Which Tablo products support 3.0? Or if they aren’t out yet - when will they be out?
(no point for me buying one now that doesn’t support 3.0)
Currently, there is only one device that is on the market that supports ATSC 3.0 - the SiliconDust HDHomerun 4K. That being said, I live in Austin, TX, and they are “live” with 4 stations, but they are “rebroadcasts” of the original HD programming, only difference is AC-4 audio (instead of AC-3). Many devices lack support for AC-4 audio at this time - and the 3rd party DVR apps don’t support ATSC 3.0 broadcasts.
I have the tuner, and it isn’t ready for “prime-time” as of today. I still use my Tablo DVRs for all my recordings. And in the near future (probably the next 1-2 years), I don’t see that changing. There are too many issues out there between the broadcasters issues, the tuners having issues and the DVRs that don’t support the new codecs required for ATSC 3.0.
But do the new tuners provide better ATSC 1.0 reception and quality then the previous model?
Since the cost of equipment to record and process 4K is significant, I wouldn’t expect local content to change very soon. And advertising revenue is down due to covid. Even Sinclair had a big layoff.
HDHomerun is only DVR at this time. Hopefully Tablo gets to work.
For the HDHomeRun 4K units I have heard nothing but good things about their ATSC 1.0 performance - And that it is noticeably better than the previous generation of SiliconDust tuners. On the ATSC 3.0 side, one thing to be aware of with their current “4K” four tuner unit is that only two of the four tuners are ATSC 3.0 capable, whereas all four are ATSC 1.0 capable. It’s a bit strange to me that they didn’t just make all four tuners 1.0/3.0 capable, along with maybe moving to a gigabit Ethernet port, and be done with it for the long haul.
I owned a connect duo. Worked like a champ. I gave it to my neighbor and bought a 4K just to see if the tuners were better(?).
To me it does seem the reception was better. But I didn’t really have reception issues.
The FCC isn’t going to give out any RF frequencies to accommodate ATSC 3.0. One plan was to aggregate multiple ATSC 1.0 channels onto lighthouse channel(s) and using the freed up channels for ATSC 3.0. But if you look at the areas with ATSC 3.0 they seem to do the reverse. They stack multiple ATSC 3.0 braodcasts onto one RF channel. So why would a user need tons of ATSC 3.0 tuners.
Since most ATSC 3.0 is still 1080i or 1080p why pay for extra ATSC 3.0 tuners and ethernet that you aren’t going to need for years.
And call me next year when there is wide spread generalized cheap solution for AC-4.
What 4K content is there right now? I can get the benefit of better reception but the 4K is sorta irrelevant until actual 4K content is produced.
New, better tuners can mean that channels with weak signals have a stronger more consistent signal.
Or where tablo gets 40 signals hdhomerun gets 50 usable channel. Of course you may not be interested in the extra 10 channels.
In Austin, TX, ATSC 3.0 went “live” over a year ago. After it went “live”, it took about 6 months to get a decent picture on the 4 channels (which are rebroadcast 1080 signals, not 4K). The second station owner recently brought up their 4 channels - and the same thing that happened with the first one, it has been hit or miss for live video, and it is 1080 picture - not 4K.
I use a HDHomerun 4K, and it will allow multiple stations using the RF channel to stream (i.e. if the channel is 7.1, then you would watch/record 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and/or 7.5 using one tuner). With ATSC 1.0, you need two or more tuners to do the same thing.
I am still using Tablo to record my programs (I have two 4-tuner models), because there isn’t an incentive to switch, as the ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are unreliable at best for the time, and there isn’t an increase in video resolution.
Theoretically, you can stack well over 30 HD channels on one RF channel for ATSC 3.0 (this hasn’t been tested in the real world yet), where ATSC 1.0 was limited in bandwidth (usually 1-2 HD channels plus 3-4 SD channels was the limit).
Going by the current rate of development, I doubt that it will widely be used as an alternative for at least 3-5 years - as 99.9% of American households can’t tune an ATSC 3.0 channel…and it will probably be 10 years or more before the ATSC 1.0 channels start going dark…
So funny how we were tossing around “3-5 years from now”… approximately 3 years ago.
(truth is, it was more like 5 years ago)
All the major station owners suffered severe ad revenue decline during covid. Thus most ATSC 3.0 plans were put on hold.
While most people refer to all 1080 as the same, ATSC 1.0 OTA maximum quality is 1080i while for ATSC 3.0 1080p would probably be more normal. 1080p would probably be most beneficial for sports.
While the Olympics were going to be broadcast in 4K who knows now. And I think they recently ran some successful tests with phones with tuners where they drove 60+ miles on a freeway with ATSC 3.0 TV reception.