[mythtv-users] commercially-produced mythboxes -- an idea

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Sat Jan 15 14:24:54 EST 2005


On Sat, Jan 15, 2005 at 10:52:36PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 10:27:26PM -0800, Brad Templeton wrote:
> > if you do it cheap you will see:
> > 
> [..]
> > PC-HDTV card:                   $190        (For SDTV and 2nd tuner)
> > WINTV-PVR-250                   $130
> 
> On an unrelated note, is digital TV coverage in the USA decent enough
> that you would be able to forget analog TV sometime soon?

Well... yes and no.   In this area (SF Bay) all the OTA stations have
gone digital, and that's true in many areas.   However for most people
a large part of TV is no longer in the broadcast sector, and comes only
from cable or satellite.

In addition for those reverting back to broadcast antennas from cable,
it's a bit of an adventure unless all the stations are in the same
direction and/or you live close to the transmitters.

On the other hand, soon the pc-hdtv card, according to rumours, will
support QAM, and be able to pick up the digital signals of the local
channels from cable TV, so no antenna adventures, but you still can't
tune the cable channels.

In June, the broadcast flag tribulations begin -- illegal to sell cards
that just give you the raw mpeg stream in the clear.   A couple of
years after that, however, Moore's law gives us hardware cards that
can encode component video or DVI.

Then the push will come from the studios to get rid of component video
and DVI.  (They are already fully underway with DVI, almost all new
TV sets have HDMI instead, which is backwards compatible with DVI.)
Uncertain how that battle will go.
> 
> In Australia we have SDTV and HDTV on digital. Some networks don't
> transmit all programs on their HD channels, but everything is on SDTV at
> least. The bitrates are quite reasonable (~3-5Gb per hour).

Here, the stations, when they transmit SD, still do it as HD, ie. they
upsample the 480i signal into a 1080i encoding, putting bars on the side
of it!   I find this incredibly stupid, and it means your recordings
are giant.   Some, but not all of the stations, also do another subchannel
with the show in 480i, so you can record that.  (I wish they did it 480p,
because the 1080i upsampled signal, while huge, is a bit better in
quality than the 480i digital signal.)

Ideally you would want a smart transcoder that spotted a 1080i signal
upsampled to HD, and re-converted it to a 480p mp4 or something.
> 
> I can't tell if your stations there (USA) are transmitting both SDTV and
> HDTV on digital? If you have SDTV on digital, why would you include an
> analog card like the PVR-250?

Because it's only the stations.   Almost everybody also wants cable
channels.   The pcHDTV can in theory record your cable channels (with
the no-compression frame grabber) over the svideo port by controlling
a digital cable box or other tuner over irblaster, but very few folks
are doing this from what I understand.


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