[mythtv-users] HD over FireWire Questions

Steve Adeff adeffs at gmail.com
Mon Jan 16 14:16:56 UTC 2006


On Saturday 14 January 2006 21:50, Chris Ribe wrote:
> To echo what Ian said, the DCT-6200 (and I assume other Firewire capable
> cable boxes as well) will downconvert HD channels and output them on its
> S-Video output.  These channels tend to have better picture quality than
> their SD counterparts.  This is especially true of OTA broadcast channels.
> God only knows how many times that content gets tossed around between
> analog and digital before it makes it to your doorstep.

From what I've read, all cable company's take direct digital feeds from the 
local stations for the analog or digital stations. This is at least true for 
the city markets, smaller town stations might still be obtained by large 
antennas. All non-OTA are obtained via satelite digital straight from the 
cable channel. Once in the hands of the cable company they run all their 
transcoding and compression on the channel, each of which has different 
standards for what resolution and compression level they use for what 
channel.

Because of this, HD downcoverted channels will always look better over SD 
outputs.  So if you care not for the actual HD stream, your best bet is to 
take advantage of this and just use a PVR-150 even for the HD channels. The 
downside is, non of the PVR cards support AC3 input. so you won't get the 
surround sound from the HD or 5.1 supported SD stations (like HBO1, 
Showtime1, etc).

-- 
Steve


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