Brad Templeton -- HDTV and MythTV

Brad has some interesting observations and features requests around HDTV and MythTV. I suspect that some of these would apply well to non-HDTV situations as well, particularly DVB based systems (like mine).

The lack of progress on HDTV in the UK is pretty depressing. From what I read it seems that DVB-T isn’t going to provide the bandwidth necessary to supply HDTV, as a single multiplex would be required for each HDTV channel. At the moment each multiplex provides several channels (something around eight). DVB-S has more bandwidth, but anything involving satellite television in the UK means that you have to deal with BSkyB as they have an effective monopoly. Sky announced HDTV trials for 2006 or so, but that’s quite a long way off.

For my own MythTV system at home the main challenges right now are:

• getting a functioning remote,
• organising playback on the main television in our living room.

The first of these is probably easily solved by spending a small amount of money. The second seems more complicated. Sure it could be solved by spending a larger amount of money (but still not huge sums), but it seems that it should be possible with all of the bits of hardware that I have lying around :-) Probably the dominating factor is a lack of time, which is all too common I’m sure.