[mythtv-users] Confusion about Output Cards.

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/16/2006 12:04 PM, Meatwad wrote:

>Jesse Guardiani wrote:
>  
>
>>Steven Adeff wrote:
>>
>>>as well, don't expect a long run of any video cable to look great. You
>>>may want to look into a putting together a remote frontend or see if
>>>RokuMyth will work for you.
>>>
>>Is there actually signal loss over a digital cable? I would have thought 
>>it would be all or nothing...
>>
>Yes. Of most interest to us is the capacitance element inherent in all 
>multiconductor cable. This element increases as the run gets longer. 
>Signal is signal be it analog or digital. Analog will decrease in 
>quality as the cable run gets longer. So will digital but the reciever 
>will not care that the signal is degraded - to a point. When that 
>threshold is reached, the digital receiver will not sync up and simply 
>stop functioning, hence the "all or nothing".
>  
>

Although with video, you may get bit errors that prevent the decoding of 
individual frames or blocks within your video, so you see 
"artifacts"--such that the number and frequency of artifacts increases 
(because of increasing number/frequency of bit erros) until the stream 
is so corrupt it cannot be decoded at all.

See also 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/138046#138046 (and 
the link within it) for reasons why digital is not necessarily better 
than analog (and, why analog is not necessarily better than digital).  
In the post, I talked about the problems with HDMI and DVI cables (= why 
long runs won't work) and the article at the link within talks primarily 
about component versus DVI/HDMI, but the same holds true for VGA versus 
DVI/HDMI...

Mike