[mythtv-users] Zenith DTT900 Digital Converter with MythTV

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Thu May 29 02:13:50 UTC 2008


Nick Morrott wrote:
> .2008/5/29 Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com>:
>> So do I have it right? This is a box that converts digital TV signals
>> into an analogue signal so you can feed it into a PVR-150 and convert
>> it back to digital again?
> 
> I was wondering the same thing - are PCI/USB ATSC tuners not eligible
> for the coupons? (I'm in the UK, so don't know the US situation)

Nope, very basic tuners, only channel output modulation or composite+audio or 
svideo+audio are allowed.  No PVR functions are allowed, no component/hdmi/... 
output are allowed on a coupon eligible box, and nothing else funny is allowed.

> 
> Not only do you lose OTA HDTV entirely (with its improved resolution,
> video and audio quality), you also lose the higher quality video and
> audio seen in digital SD transmissions because they are first
> converted to analogue video, then re-encoded back to MPEG-2. A PCI/USB
> ATSC tuner records the digital transport stream directly to disk with
> no loss in quality, supports HDTV, and requires no further setting up
> (LIRC for example).

With a good OTA analog signal my 150 is giving pretty good quality so I expect 
that a very little quality is being lost (over SD signals, on HD lots will of 
course be lost).

> 
> I'd suggest getting a PCI/USB DVB/ATSC tuner when usable OTA signals
> are available, and only resort to using a framegrabber/hardware
> capture card when there is no other means of getting those signals
> into the machine.
> 
The converter boxes cost $10-$20 and the PCI/USB tuners are quite a bit more 
than that and it is kind of a shame to waste the nice reliable PVR-150s that we 
already have.    I do have one ATSC tuner, but transcode everything down to SD 
anyway for display and to cut down storage requirements.

My frontend set top box does support HD and only 1 of my TV's can even do HD, 
and I expect a lot of others are in similar situations.

                             Roger




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