Over the last couple of evenings I’ve got my geek on and set up my laptop – an Asus G2S – as an overpriced TV tuner so that I could take a look at the Freeview TV service. The setup basically consists of the following:

• My laptop is running MediaPortal, a decent but so far unstable media player. I have Vista, but Windows Media Center can’t handle the display codec Freeview needs. What a surprise.
• The UHF aerial plugs straight into the laptop
• The HDMI port on the laptop is finally proving useful, as it carries the video and sound to my LCD TV

The whole set up is a bit mickey mouse, really – my HDMI cable is about a metre long, so the laptop has to sit immediately beside the TV thereby rendering it useless for any other activity whilst it’s broadcasting. What’s more, even if it was within reach it wouldn’t be usable because whenever I move focus away from MediaPortal the TV picture vanishes and the program needs to be restarted.

It works though, and getting it working geek-style was fun. Unfortunately, once the novelty wears off, TV still isn’t worth watching.

As an aside, Freeview’s choice of domain name is slightly perplexing. They chose to go with freeviewnz.tv, which freeviewtv.co.nz conveniently redirects to. They also hold the domain that would be everyone’s first guess – freeview.co.nz – but this isn’t set up as a redirect or a virtual host so most people looking for the site will needlessly miss with their first attempt.