Have you been pulling your hair out trying to watch satellite tv on your computer? Many folks know it can be done but are confused on how to do it. I am going to give you my quick and easy recipe for watching satellite tv on your computer. There are only a few steps and it is a cinch on you know how. Most people still use a conventional TV set and a set-top sattelite receiver to watch sattelite TV but it's fast becoming popular to watch satellite TV on your PC. More and more homes today are equipped with at least one PC and most of those pcs are perfectly capable of showing DVDs, streamed video and sattelite TV. Free to Air (FTA) satellite broadcasts Free to air satellite TV broadcasts are transmitted for you to enjoy without needing to pay any additional subscription or pay-to-view charges. Unless you live in the UK of course where you have to buy a TV licence no matter what TV broadcasts you receive. The vast majority of satellite TV to PC solutions available are designed to receive FTA broadcasts, which can mean a lot of channels depending on where in the world you live. If you want to watch premium channels from your satellite TV provider then you will need a decoder to unscramble the signal. More about that in the article DescramblerSatellite TV. What is USB and which version do you need? The short answer to this is "Make sure you get USB 2" on your PC. Most if not all modern PCs support it so you don't need to worry too much. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus and comes in two main versions, version 1 and version 2. Version 1 was the first USB standard to be released and allowed for many peripheral devices to be added to your PC without needing to open the box and do some techy stuff. USB 1 or 1.1 was a little slow however and didn't perform well when used for video applications. It will not support high definition TV (HDTV) at all. USB 2 on the other hand has a maximum speed specification of 480 Mbps, which is about 40 times faster than USB 1.1. USB 2 is well suited to all kinds of video applications that you might want to use. What you need to watch satellite TV on your PC Most of the satellite to PC solutions are available for Windows ? only so that's what I'm assuming that you will be using. PC System requirements ? Microsoft? Windows? XP ? Microsoft? DirectX9.0C or later ? Microsoft? Windows? Media Player 9.0 or later ? P4 2G MHZ CPU or above ? 256MB RAM or above ? VGA card with at least 32MB memory ? Sound card or on board sound chip ? One free USB 2.0 port In addition to your PC you will need the following: ? Digital Satellite Dish & LNB ? USB satellite TV receiver with DVB-S How to connect your USB FTA satellite receiver to your pc When you have installed, or had a professional install, your satellite dish and LNB you can connect the cable from the dish to your satellite TV receiver. The next thing to do is to install on your computer any software that came with your USB satellite receiver. Just follow the set-up instructions supplied with the receiver. When you have done that you can connect a USB cable, which is normally supplied with the receiver, into a free USB 2 port on your PC. Run up the software that you installed and away you go. That's it. It is real simple to watch satellite tv on your computer! Want to find out more about watch satellite tv on your computer? You can learn more at http://www.satellitetvtopc.net/ |
