[mythtv] New QAM compatible HDTV card

[Michael T. Dean]

On 08/19/2004 11:18 AM, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

>On Wednesday 18 August 2004 15:00, brian weatherill wrote:
>  
>
>>There's a new CX23881 based card that perportedly supports QAM64,
>>with QAM256 support in the future.. (Unencrypted of course).. Details
>>available at :
>>http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/fusion3qam.asp
>>    
>>
>- IMHO, this is somewhat of a waste of time.  The card is only capable 
>of decoding unencrypted QAM channels.  Many providers encrypt all of 
>their channels, whether they're premium channels or not. (cf. the 
>reviewer from the above link; the only unencrypted channels he got were 
>the PPV-preview channels).
>
Agreed.  Also, it seems that the pcHDTV 3000 (and possibly 2000) will 
support QAM, anyway.  And, the whole open-source philosophy of "choice 
to the user" and "support a lot of hardware to help the most 
users/prevent any one company from gaining too much control" doesn't 
really apply since it will be illegal to manufacture (in the US) or 
import (to the US) either of these cards after July 1, 2005 (without 
adding broadcast flag support--which would almost definitely mean 
dropping support for open source systems).  (Although, it will be really 
interesting to see what Jack Kelliher does with the pcHDTV next year...)

>I think a better use of time would be to 
>develop FireWire support for Myth (for FCC-mandated FireWire-enabled 
>cable boxes), as this is likely the only (legal) way we'll be able to 
>get digital cable content into Myth in the forseeable future (without 
>going through an analog step first), and even then it'll only be 480p.
>  
>
And, keep pushing the hardware/software (i.e. as Cory mentioned with the 
GNU Radio and FPGA approach) for OTA broadcasts and even for re-encoding 
signals after going through the analog step (now there's a process to 
max out your future SMP AMD64 machine with multi-core processors :).

Mike