[mythtv-users] A not so High Definition fan, takes a 180 turn.

[Brad Templeton]

The 5C is named for "5 companies" which got together to screw the
consumer with a copy protection system for digital video.

In theory, however, you can stream unencrypted, non-5C mpegs (and DV
format) to your 1394/firewire TV.  And to me that seems like a mostly
great soulution, a "pure" PVR where the signal is digital all the way
until the monitor itself which does the final decompression.

However, MythTV certainly doesn't support it, and in fact I have not
found much sign of linux code to stream an mpeg2 out a firewire port in
the proper format.  (There are tools to stream video in dv format out
firewire for working with camcorders, I have not worked too hard to see
if they can do something with the tv and mpegs.)

If you find some, let us know.

The other big issue though is that I don't know if it's possible to
do on-screen-display overlayed on top of the mpeg stream.  There are
suggestions the protocol allows the sending of overlay video for OSD.

Secondly, the same problem applies to the menus.  You would need an
X server with a driver to do firewire output instead of a video card, I
do not believe that exists though it would be possible.

However, with most of these TVs, they will altnerate between an analog
menu and the firewire streaming, so you could do the menus out a video
card, and switch to video over firewire.  That would be acceptable.

Another cute feature of the firewire streaming in DTVLink (the yet another
name for 1394 for tvs) is that the signals from the TV's remote control
are passed back to the device.   Thus your TV remote control can be
used to control the PVR, without needing a different channel.

But I don't think we are anywhere near having this.

The nice thing is that as a pure PVR, the PVR box could be very lightweight,
with a sub-ghz CPU, since the CPU doesn't do very much at all.  Certainly
the frontend could be tiny-CPU.