Unrealistic expectations

    Hello Everybody

    Just purchased a very cheap (£6.49) unofficial raspberry pi tv hat and to be fair the quality of the picture is pretty good considering the price. The question I have though, is there a tv tuner that will produce the same or better picture quality as the tuner that is built into my 10+ years old pioneer tv. I have a humax box attached to the tv at the moment and although the picture is slightly better than the pi tv hat, it is still not as good as the on board tv tuner. Am I doing something wrong or are my expectations unrealistic to think that I can get an equivalent picture quality form a computer peripheral. I am in the UK and most of the tv channels that I watch are only SD quality and of course the pi and the humax are attached to the pioneer via hdmi cables and i am pretty sure I have the correct output set on both the pi and the humax, but the picture just does not look as crisp. In fact i would say the humax and pi HD channels are about the same quality as a SD channel just using the pioneer tuner.

    Thanks in advance

    Dan

    It is what is. A project accessory and priced accordingly. It’s not an appliance module that justs works out of the box. As was suggested do a little research on it. There plenty of examples of working projects out there you could investigate and learn from. It’s obviously a good starting point for a DVBT server which you can use to serve TS to a client and let the client do all the video processing. Here’s a typical example of one.

    How To Stream Digital TV With The Raspberry Pi TV HAT
    We’ve put together this easy to follow, step-by-step guide to show you exactly how to assemble, install and configure the Raspberry Pi TV HAT to stream, record…
    thepihut.com

    Hello petediscrete and thank you for the reply

    I am not sure what you are saying. That the picture quality will be better if i connect via a client over the network rather than my current setup which has my raspberry pi and the tv hat connected directly to my tv using a hdmi lead with libreelec and vdr installed on the sd card to provide the tv picture directly to my tv. As far as I can tell my cpu and memory even on a Raspberry pi 3B+ are well under utilized.

    I am not knocking the raspberry pi (I have 4) or the tv hat, just my expectation to see if any computer peripheral (tuner) can match or preferably better the quality of a tv that was purchased 14 years ago and admittedly cost £1800.

    Is the general consensus that a tv tuner built into the tv just more tuned to provide better picture quality than an added component or genuinely am i doing something wrong?

    I’m suggesting you use the Pi Hat/RPI4 Combo as a streaming device. You can then stream to any device attached to you Network you like to make comparisons. I find the Raspberry Pi very limiting when it comes to playing video. Just pass the transport stream received by the Pi Hat to something a little more capable of processing the transport stream to make comparison between it and your built in setup. In fact the Pi4 is overkill. A Pi3 would be satisfactory or even a Pi Zero W as far as I know. As I suggested research other projects and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

    This thingy effectively prevents you from having a heatsink? I don't see the point then unless you're okay with not fully utilizing your RPi 3/4 CPU and GPU. And Pi Zeros lack Ethernet so they won't make very good job of distributing channels to LAN. Personally I was thinking about getting DVB-T2 USB stick. But I don't know how good is their support under LE and Kodi.

    Edited once, last by gibbon (January 25, 2023 at 3:14 AM).

    Quote from gibbon

    Personally I was thinking about getting DVB-T2 USB stick. But I don't know how good is their support under LE and Kodi.

    AFAIK current latest LE & Kodi releases does NOT have a special support for DVB-T2 USB sticks. So you have to check whether the DVB-T USB stick you wish to use is supported by Linux kernel (release that current LE is running on) or not.

    Quote from ghtester

    AFAIK current latest LE & Kodi releases does NOT have a special support for DVB-T2 USB sticks. So you have to check whether the DVB-T USB stick you wish to use is supported by Linux kernel (release that current LE is running on) or not.

    I'd have to investigate this since I'm not sure whether they need any device-specific driver in kernel. They are USB devices after all so also part of some standard USB "class"?