[mythtv-users] OT: ATSC/QAM Encode to distribute HD over longer runs.

[Roger Heflin]

Chris Ribe wrote:
> What sort of distances do you have in mind when you say "longer distances"?
> While such a device would be useful for multicasting within a house, it will
> definitely take specialized hardware, and ultimately it will be feature poor
> as compared to a cheap set top box that can decode an HD stream off of an
> ethernet connection.
> 
> An useful incarnation of such a device would have to include an encoder:
> The practical value of a PC attached device that could do nothing more than
> remux and retransmit saved ATSC streams would be extremely low.
> 
> -chris
>

Depends.   It is trivial to do software encoding of menus into an atsc stream to 
provide menus and such, it gets harder if you want to have active video under 
the menus but that is not that much of an issue, and then all you need is a 
remote control stream coming back to control it, and the remote control stream 
is something that is fairly simple to do, most of the ATSC stream would be fed 
directly (with no software decode/reencoding needed), but the menus and such 
would need to be actively generated.

And so far the "cheap" set top box (that does actual HD w/enet) is $200-$300 and 
you need one for *EACH* television, and if you have a number of TV's that gets 
to be more expensive than the other solution.

A second though, would be a video card that outputs an ATSC stream, though this 
is closer to what the box in question provides, though would be a bit simpler 
since it does not need A/D converters to decode the RGB signals before encoding 
them into mpeg.


                           Roger