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Try AccessDTV It pipes the HDTV stream right onto the VGA stream but you can record (1GB/hour) and take screenshots. It was reviewed by How Stuff Works

HD DVD is still in a blue-laser MPEG-2 vs. red-laser MPEG-4 fight, but digital VCRs already exist and do let you record high definition programming.

It's called D-VHS. D-Theater is a standard on top of that that adds tough encryption for distribution of Wacky Jack V.'s movies so they'll be hard to back up.

The limitation of D-VHS in recording is that you're depending on a tuner to give you signals. 8VSB-broadcast-only (OTA or "over the air") tuners may never be DRM-crippled by the proposed broadcast flag, but satellite and combo HD-OTA/sat tuners are subject to nasty firmware upgrades with Digital Restrictions Managed. It's possible that even OTA-only tuners will be upgraded with MPEG private section data, but that reqires cooperation of broadcasters.

There are also OTA-only HD tuner cards for PCs. Whether there are backdoors for "upgrading" the DRM if the broadcast flag flies is left as an exercise (try SoftICE). The streams that at least one of the cards captured are not "in the clear," which gives you an idea of the mfg.'s intentions. There are no open source drivers for any of these cards working yet. The Telemann "independent developer" project for HiPix requires an NDA to get source access. Teralogic who makes the chip on that board has been bought by Oak, BTW.

HD DVD is still in a blue-laser MPEG-2 vs. red-laser MPEG-4 fight, but digital VCRs already exist and do let you record high definition programming.

It's called D-VHS. D-Theater is a standard on top of that that adds tough encryption for distribution of Wacky Jack V.'s movies so they'll be hard to back up.

The limitation of D-VHS in recording is that you're depending on a tuner to give you signals. 8VSB-broadcast-only (OTA or "over the air") tuners may never be DRM-crippled by the proposed broadcast flag, but satellite and combo HD-OTA/sat tuners are subject to nasty firmware upgrades with Digital Restrictions Managed. It's possible that even OTA-only tuners will be upgraded with MPEG private section data, but that reqires cooperation of broadcasters.

There are also OTA-only HD tuner cards for PCs. Whether there are backdoors for "upgrading" the DRM if the broadcast flag flies is left as an exercise (try SoftICE). The streams that at least one of the cards captured are not "in the clear," which gives you an idea of the mfg.'s intentions. There are no open source drivers for any of these cards working yet. The Telemann "independent developer" project for HiPix requires an NDA to get source access. Teralogic who makes the chip on that board has been bought by Oak, BTW.

With any of several HDTV tuner cards (HiPix, AccessDTV, and MyHD, to name three) you can do timeshifting and in some cases editing of HD material. For example, I record "Alias" in HD every week and archive it to DVD-R. It's a much more versatile option than a simple HDTV set-top tuner box. All of those cards will output either composite or RGB to feed into an HDTV set. If you subscribe to DISH Network and you have the right kind of satellite receiver, you can feed HD HBO into one of those tuner cards for timeshifting as well.

You can get ATSC HDTV PCI card for your PC (MyHD, AccessDTV, etc). These cards reportedly need 10 gig per hour of recording, which is a bit more than a Tivo at Best quality will use (like 2.5 times). IMHO, HDTV would be a better use of that space.

And while there are currently no HDTV Tivo's available, Tivo has shown a prototype one. When will it be available? Probably as soon as it becomes worthwhile ($$$) for Tivo to sell them. Tivo/Replay/etc. are having a hard enough time selling boxes that handle a format that at least 95% of the population of the US can handle!

Currently, none of the commercial PVR manufacturers support HDTV. So, if you want to record Digital TV, you need to build your own. By the way, Digital TV is great for PVR's, no compression is needed, the TV program is an MPEG2 stream - making the PVR's job easy. This is very similar to the PVR's for DirecTV.

There are a few choices for HDTV PVR cards:
Telemann Hipix - They have a semi-open source project for their Windows drivers. Availability seems to be a problem.
AccessDTV - Has some nice features, like pausing live TV. But, they have some drawkacks - Locked video files, so they can only be played back on the same machine - and their PVR guide is a subscription service.
MyHD - Newer card, some nice features like DVD vob playback (scaled to 1080i or 720p, looks great!)
Hauppage WinTV-HD - Not sure if this is still sold. Not well supported if it is.

Pop one of these into a computer system, add a big hard drive to hold those HD programs (~ 9GB/hr), and off you go.

I use the MyHD card, and I have been using the DVD scaling feature as much as the HDTV reception. I copy my DVD's to the hard drive of my system, and now I have a pretty nice video library, with immediate access - no swapping disks.

Actually, if you are willing to build your own PVR (and I can understand that some aren't), there are quite a few options for timeshifting HDTV content. Namely;

AccessDTV: http://www.accessdtv.com/accessdtv/index.htm
Hauppauge WinTV-HD: http://www.hauppauge.com
Telemann HiPix: http://www.telemann.com/products/dtv200.html

There are quite a few opinions on these cards, and if you are really interested you should be sure to check a more recent one because as the software they use changes, so does the capabilities of the cards. As always, a great resource for all of this is the AVS Forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ [avsforum.com]

They mention HDTV in the article, but only in the context of HDTV output of a lo-res source. The DVD's are 480p at best. So, you can scale them up to 720p or 1080i, but it's not full HD.

Slap an HDTV PCI card in there, and get true 1080i (1920x1080) HDTV. They also HD PVR functions, and some even do DVD decoding & scaling in hardware.

Check out the MyHD Card, the HiPix, or the AccessDTV cards for options.

Unfortunately, none of these (that I know of) support Linux. The MyHD is the newest, and the HiPix has an open source effort to enhance their Windows software.

If you live in an area that has digital TV broadcasts (most major cities do), HDTV is the way to go.. there is a LOT of HD Programming available.

• Hauppauge WinTV-D.
• HiPix
• AccessDTV

This is a great project.. a fully open sourced PVR. If I lived in Europe, I would be all over it.

For use in the U.S. a Digital TV receiver card such as the HiPix or the AccessDTV.

Depending on how the hardware interfaces with the control software, it would be excellent if it could be made to work with U.S. cards.

I have a ViewSonic VG191 19" LCD and a Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron hooked up to my ATI Radeon 8500 dualhead card at home, and a Sony M81 18" LCD at work. The VG191 has *almost* as much viewable area as the G500 (remember, a 21" tube has slightly less than 20" of usable screen), and hooked up to the DVI port it's razor sharp and very easy to read at its native 1280x1024 res. The VG191 is noticibly larger than the Sony 18". Alas, ViewSonic hiked the price by $300 a few weeks ago (a few days after I bought mine, when's the last time that happened?), so you'll spend at least $1200 to get one. It comes with DVI and analog cables though, the Sony M81 only comes with an analog cable(dumb!). One irritation with the ViewSonic: text mode (BIOS startup, etc) chops off the lower right section of the screen when using the DVI port (everything's fine via analog). The KDE desktop displayed on the VG191 via DVI is unbelievably cool.

Sony's entry level 21" FD Trinitron is ~$500 (the better G520P is ~$750), so if funds are tight, hey, you won't suffer too much. I use my G500 for HDTV video more than anything else these days, which no affordable LCD can do (Apple's HD Cinema display will, but it's $3500). But given a choice, LCD via DVI is the way to go.

AccessDTV makes a PCI HDTV card that can record the 20Mbps HDTV datastream to your hard drive. I have one. Very, very nice with my Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron monitor (wish I could justify one of those 24" widescreen models). Windows only, and a GHz-class PC is recommended (excellent on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800+ machine).

It's lousy for analog TV, won't record analog at all and I never did get audio working for analog, but it's the card to get for digital TV.

Maybe I'm just getting old and aware of the passage of time, but I've wound up whittling down the number of TV shows I watch to a select few and getting nearly all my news from online, my local newspaper, and a magazine. This despite the fact that I have a very nice satellite dish and HDTV PCI card. There's just too many other things I want to do. The TV stays off for many days of the week, and I don't miss it. (Darn the WB and UPN for making decent shows! Even Enterprise has gotten good lately.) What's disturbing is the contrast with the rest of my family, who despite lacking the technotoys I have spend far more time in front of the tube. It's unbelievable how much crap my brother watches.

This from a guy who's not very sociable.

Now, take my Internet feed away and I'm going to hurt somebody...

Regarding PCI cards for HDTV reception,
AccessDTV seems to get the best reviews.

Others are the Hauppauge WinTV-HD and Telemann HiPix-200.

What's wrong with the Live!? It pollutes the PCI bus with noise, which is why it's a frequent source of PCI DMA I/O corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) on VIA chipset boards. I've found the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to be an excellent, trouble-free replacement, and best of all Red Hat Linux autoconfigures it (zero human intervention required). See the SCFAQ on VIA Hardware.

I couldn't figure out why my HDTV card was locking up every hour or so on my KT133 board, nor why WinXP was crashing frequently on my KT266 board. Removing the Live!'s fixed both systems. I didn't bother attempting a Live! on my new KT266A.

Everyone who runs Linux or who would want to see Linux drivers should send a petition for one (service@accessDTV.com and support@accessDTV.com ... better addresses if you can find it). I know I will.

Everyone who runs Linux or who would want to see Linux drivers should send a petition for one (service@accessDTV.com and support@accessDTV.com ... better addresses if you can find it). I know I will.

As with all other similar solutions (ShowShifter, Telemman HiPix, Hauppage WinTV PVR & HD, AccessDTV, etc), what will make or break this product is the level of integration, and the quality of the SW. So far, the integration with existing A/V equipment has been rather poor. The Destination had to use expensive Computer-IR out transceivers to control your cable/satellite box and VCR, plus the input remote (and I think they never got the SW quite right), and most solutions right now don't offer any kind of IR control integration.

Currently, SnapStream is working on adding more support for this type of integration. John Vanderbeck is leading an Open Source project (IRTuner) to support multiple IR out transcievers. He has written a driver to use the ActiSys 200L (~$65) from SnapStream. He is working on adding support for the RedRat2, and future candidates are the CiR and LIRC. We are also looking into integrating with Girder, making the interface available to other applications beside SnapStream, and adding more functionality and in general, making it easier to turn your PC into a real A/V integration tool...

Actually, products that let you record DTV streams do exist:
http://www.accessdtv.com/

The best place I've found for information on the current state of this "Borg PC" is the AVSForum HTPC board. Some of the forum members have customized their PCs to a degree that comes pretty close. They aren't an every user, dumb down PC, but some come pretty close at being user friendly... The problem remains being the cost. The Gateway Destination came pretty close to bringing it all togheter, but it was underpowered, and very few people would pay for it (so it was discontinued)...

Some manufacturers are starting to come around and to provide automation features, that enable some customization (like ATI, which now has an API for remotes). Girder seems to be a great hub for programmability features, where several Open Source projects converge in controlling the HTPC.

A few general comments: * 560 GB of storage is almost affordable for personal use. Just use 8 80 GB HD with a RAID 5 controller (like the 3Ware 6800). It'd cost ~$2300, which isn't cheap, but you'd have plenty of storage, and you even get some redundancy...

* UltimateTV and the XBox are going this way. The XBox will be HDTV compatible, and future generations might include a HDTV tuner. And then using USB you might get additional funcitonality. A merging of UTB and XBox might also be possible. Probably the biggest objection would be that this is a MS solution...

* There at at least 3 HDTV PC Tuner cards available (Telemann HiPix, Hauppage WinTV-HD, and AccessDTV). All the manufacturers are working into building digital PVR functions into their products, which will make HDTV tuners a Tivo alternative (at least for OTA broadcasts).

* SnapStream is working to provide PVR features on your PC (there was another, but I don't have a name handy), and the company is very open to user feedback and open source development (as the IRTuner Project shows).

* Don't forget PDA's and mobile multimedia devices. As more multimedia is available, the box will make it accesible on the go, so you can take movies with you when you commute, or access music from anywhere in your house (using 802.11b) w/o requiring a PC or a full blown device, just your PDA. SnapStream recognizes the potential of PDAs, and is offering PocketPVS so you can transcode video and play it back on your PPC.

HDTV might be the catalyst that pushes the HTPC out of obscurity, and that creates the borg box. With every US household having to replace their TV in the next few years, more will start to consider cheap HDTV PC Tuners, using existing big screen displays and/or large screen Monitors (and VGA compatible TVs).