[mythtv-users] Zenith DTT901

[stuart]

stuart wrote:
> 
> 
> Bill Williamson wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Adam Siegel <agsiegel at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:agsiegel at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>> I have a few Zenith DTT901's. It is the HD to SD converter that can be
>>> purchased with the government $40 coupon. The unit really works well.
>>> The tuner is much more sensitive than the AVerMedia AVerTVHD MCE A180
>>> cards I have in my myth setup. And the picture quality is outstanding
>>> for SD only ouput.
>>>  
>>> Are there any electrical engineering types that could break down the
>>> unit and see if we could hook up an HDMI or component output and
>>> eventually integrate directly with myth somehow? I'd be happy to send
>>> out a motherboard for examination. I saw on another site that someone
>>> thought there was a "mysterious" 4 pin ribbon cable attachment that may
>>> support YUV.
>>
>> This box is a digital to analog converter, not an HD to SD converter. 
>> Digital TV transmission does not mean "HD".
> 
> I think what Admin wants to do is use the box to receive ATSC and 
> convert it to SD so he can capture it on his SD mythtv box.  This puts 
> the burden of transcoding on the DTT901.  Not a bad idea.  And you don't 
> need to re-spin your mythtv box w/an ATSC tuner and all of it's problems 
> (still do not have full support of everything on my KWorld-120 card 
> under linux).
> 
> If one could find a s-video output inside the box the picture should be 
> much improved (separating the video from the color information is nasty 
> business).  I doubt component will help much more and I doubt there is 
> much of a chance of getting an hdmi output.  Besides, at that point you 
> are really asking for the mpeg2 stream are you not?  Might as well get 
> the HDHome run.
> 
> I have one of these boxes, I'll take a look and see if there's something 
> to be done with it.

Follow up:
I finally took a scope to the 4 pin connector on the processor card that 
is connected to nothing (there are 2 cards, power and processor - for 
lack of a better description).  Regretfully, I didn't see anything that 
hinted there was a signal on any of the pins.  I compared this with what 
I could see on the composite output (a rather good video signal at the 
time).  This doesn't rule out the possibility of an s-video port on the 
DTT901.  However, I did not see missing components on the processor 
board (it's common practice to design all features in but remove and add 
  parts later for different models).  It's more likely, if this is the 
s-video port, the feature is turned off in software.  Finally, not to 
dash anyone's hopes, the most common way to build a card w/an s-video 
connector is to provide a target (not a connector) on the edge of the 
board.  I don't see one here.