USB DVB-T Query

Kintarō Hattori

Hey Chaps,

I was looking at buying the below DVB stick as I have some good experience with this brand before. It supports MPEG-4 which I know will work in Ireland but I'm wondering if it'll work in the UK as well (I have family in the UK so I'm back and forth on occasion).

http://www.media-tech.eu/products/dvb-t-stick/MT4167

From what I understand the UK uses DVB-T2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2 - so it says they use MPEG-4 AVC.


Will it work in both places or do I need to look for something else?

Many thanks for any help.

fat-tony

The MPEG-4 facility will come from the PC software, not from the stick. A modern laptop or PC with dual-core processors (over 1.8GHz) should be able to handle RTE2 HD without stuttering. It should work for DVB-T (MPEG-2) SD broadcasts in the UK. It doesn't explicitly say whether the tuner (in the stick) supports DVB-T2, so I would think it unlikely to be able to tune Freeview HD broadcasts successfully, so you should look for a DVB-T2 capable tuner if you need to receive HD broadcasts in the UK.

Gerry Wicklow

At present you only need DVB-T2 for the HD mux in UK, the other five muxes still use DVB-T.

Kintarō Hattori

Thanks folks.

It seems that the DVB-T2 specification is relatively new and from what I can read only the UK uses it at present. Would the unit I linked to, or similar pick up standard freeview transmissions in the UK? I'm not particularly fussed about HD or not, just the ability to watch something when I'm on the move would be good. (I know I know smartphones etc )

fat-tony

Standard definition Freeview transmissions - yes

Gerry Wicklow

At present there are only 4 HD channels on FreeView. BBC1, BBC HD, ITV1 and Ch4/S4C. With the exception of BBC HD you will still get the SD versions of the others along with many more SD channels.