[mythtv-users] Digital Broadcasting/ATSC.. what's up?

Brandon Beattie bbeattie-maillist at linkexplorer.com
Tue Oct 7 21:01:26 EDT 2003


On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 06:33:11PM -0700, Chris Germano wrote:
> I heard about a new HDTV capture card created solely for linux http://www.pchdtv.com/hd_2000.html (lol, but cool). They say that it works with mythtv as a PVR system in the FAQ and accepts the digital broadcasts:
> "Cost effective ATSC/NTSC TV reception card, Supports all 18 ATSC compliant digital formats, Supports NTSC Analog Television."
> 
> Are these solely designed for the new digital broadcasting via airwaves or did I miss something? I live in LA and I think we have a couple channels up already, and I'm actually really interested in this. Anyone know anything about this technology? 

The HD2000 pcHDTV card is for receiving HDTV/ATSC Over The Air (OTA)
broadcasts.  Just as you use your WinTV capture card, the HD2000 does
the same but for HDTV.

> I'm currently running MythTV with a WinTV 401dbx card that has a CS878A aka Fusion 878A chipset that has HDTV/ATSC support... http://www.conexant.com/products/entry.jsp?id=272 but not sure if this is supported or even works..I'm lost. The Svideo in port is labled (DTV/Svid) on the card itself...again hmm. They have extensive product documentation on the HDTV support.. does anyone know anything about this? That would be awesome to be able to use it as a digital tuner card for broadcasts over the airwaves, or even if someone found a way to use DirecTV as all of us right now have to tune it externaly and record from analog. 

There are several efforts for getting fusion based HDTV cards working in
Linux.  See avsforums.com (The Linux HTPC section).  So far very little
success has been made, but it's only a matter of time -- But I don't
know how long it will be for those fusion cards.

As for DTV, DTV is a larger specification, of which HDTV and S-Video are
a part of (I believe, someone correct me if I'm wrong).  HDTV is not
S-VIdeo though by any means.  In the US, we use ATSC to send an mpeg2
transport stream of HDTV video streams.  HDTV tuners, and PC cards can
capture the ATSC stream that is just an mpeg2 transport stream.  Strip
off the redundant data in the transport stream and you get mpeg2-ps,
which is normal DVD mpeg2.  

Unless your card is a fusion HDTV capture card, you will never get HDTV
on it (Or any form of DTV except s-video input).  If you want to get
HDTV on Linux, the pcHDTV card is the only way.  As for support in myth,
I wrote the basic support for it in Myth.  Two others besides me have
sent in patches to fix bugs.  There could be a few more features added
also for HDTV... But you can watch HDTV just fine via the card in myth
most of the time.

--Brandon

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