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Thursday, May 01, 2008

How to Set Up Your High Definition Set Top Box on a Normal TV Without Pulling Your Hair Out




I thought it was going to be so easy to set up my new High Definition set top box. I mean, really, how hard could it be?

The answer came to me when I was waist high in cables and instruction manuals, pressing the "menu" button for the fifteenth time trying to work out what went wrong.

I'm going to try and simplify this so nobody ever goes through the same unnecessary troubles that I endured.

These steps are for connecting a HD set top box to a plain old normal television. These instructions are for a Tedelex HD set top box but should be able to translate to other models.

Step 1:

Unpack set top box. Get the cable that looks like this: (red, yellow and white)



and plug it into the set top box like this (it is colour coded so you can't really get it wrong!):




Plug your aerial into "ANT IN" on the set top box:

Then plug the other end into the red, yellow and white bits at the back of the TV.


Step 2:

Turn the set top box on.

Get the HD remote.

(THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT!)



Set the format on "PALI" - I presume this has something to do with PAL for Australia / UK TV.

On this particular remote you do the following:

FUNC
FUNC
PALI (on this remote it is the RED button!)

That's it!


Step 3:

Generally normal (older!) TVs have AV1 and Av2 to plug in audiovisual equipment. So, you will have plugged the red, yellow and white cables into eitherAV1 or AV2 which means when you get the TV remote, put the channel on Av1 or Av2. Whichever one shows up the HD menu, that's it!

On this particular model, (Tedelex TE-8200) the instruction manual tells you to press menu, select "TV channels" by pressing "OK" and searching for channels either automatically or manually.

I did an autosearch and found quite a few channels but not TenHD. Which is a disaster because TenHD is the main channel I want for the extra golf tournaments.

I realised that the aerial wasn't in the "Channel 10 spot" when I did the autosearch.

I readjusted the aerial in the Channel 10 spot and rescanned. Lo and behold all the Channel 10 stuff came up.


Step 4:

If you want to watch a channel that is being previewed in a small box on the screen, select the channel, press:

EXIT
EXIT
and
EXIT

Then you can watch the channel. I tell you something, these instruction manuals should actually say what I just said here. In plain English. Why oh why do they just skip over steps like "on what friggin channel does the set top box come through?" or "I've got the TV on, the set top box is on, the remote is working so why the crap isn't the HD menu coming up?" They just assume that you will naturally get to the point where the menu is magically displayed on screen. I ask you, what is the point of having an instruction manual if they think you can jolly well work it out for yourself?

From recent research on HD forums, it seems lot of people have spoken about the difficulty in finding a proper TV guide that includes the HD channels. I would love to find a hard copy but for now here are the online guides:

Yahoo7 TV Guide

CitySearch TV Guide

EBroadcast TV Guide

NineMSN TV Guide

According to recent news reports, Nine HD will not launch until March 2008. I wondered why I couldn't find it on any of the TV guides! Duh!

The picture is amazing. It has gone from something like this:



to this:



It's nuts. It's like watching DVDs all the time.

Hope this helps :-) Enjoy.




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