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Well, if you want something that uses low power while playing 1080p you can always use something like DViCO or similar instead of Apple TV. And if you really feel like protesting (and breaking the copyright law in most countries!!), get it on the pirate bay without DRM.

Most DVB-S satellite receiver cards will do the job, but that is for already compressed streams, of course. If your PC can handle the decompression, you can use it as a HDTV PVR for only about 60 Euro in additional hardware costs. Dvico sells a hard+software bundle called "Fusion". The decoder is excellent and works without a hitch on a measly 1.4 GHz AthlonXP with a Radeon graphics card (which has hardware decoding support), even with streams that crash all other decoders I've tried. They have a demo of the software which is time-limited to 3 minutes of consecutive playback. There are some demo streams on their website as well. Here is another demo stream recorded from the only European HDTV channel so far: 361MB.

See also the Fusion HDTV tuner; similar capabilities.

Try this card from DVICO. As long as your provider doesn't encrypt the QAM signal (probably does for HBO, Showtime, & the like) you can capture HDTV in full quality.

The only card I know of that supports HDTV on cable TV in the US with currently available drivers is the FusionHDTV3 by DVICO, with QAM (cable TV modulation) support in newer versions. The software from DVICO supports Windows only, with its own application for recording and time-shifting, When it doesn't crash it actually lets you record/timeshift unencrypted ComCast HDTV channels. There are efforts underway to support this card in Windows-MCE and Linux.

If you want to speculate about the actual product go to its website: http://www.dvico.com/. If your PC has a video card with DVI out as an option you can send the HD signal (not some pathetic neutered NTSC version that would have to go out an S-Video or composite video port). You can also send the unaltered transport stream out a FireWire port to an HD compatible FireWire port on another device. Examples would include D-VHS decks, some DVR's that are appearing and some Mitsubishi TV's will take FireWire input.

• Japanese BS/CS digital stream play including audio(AAC)

The biggest problem right now with the HDTV stand-alone recorder boxes and computer HDTV tuners is that they cannot record from digital cable. Digital Cable uses QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) which means that it generates 4 bits out of one baud for encoding HDTV channels. Cracking that is the holy grail of HDTV recording and there are many users out there willing to put up lots of cash as an incentive for this happen. The point is over-the-air (OTA) HDTV is unencrypted and can be recorded for the time being using both stand-alone and computer equipment. Both satellite-based and digital cable-based HDTV use either QAM64 or QAM256 which cannot be tuned well by any equipment out today. There was a Dish 5000 reciever that could be hacked to output HDTV digital streams over firewire but the modulation on the network has changed so the box cannot decrypt the streams anymore for output. I would suggest waiting for the time being.

To qualify the above statement, DViCO makes the Fusion HDTV QAM PCI card for desktops which unofficially claims to tune QAM256 but it still has problems with QAM64. Link A simple seach at the AVS Forums should provide more information on current issues with the card. Lastly, for you laptop PC owners out there, Sasem makes a USB HDTV tuner which claims to tune QAM but is really only useful for OTA HDTV at the moment. Link ATI will be releasing an HDTV card soon but I am not aware if it has any QAM tuning abilities.

You wouldn't have a link to a review of Dvico Fusion III Gold QAM, would you?

Product info on manufacturer's website is pretty helpful, but I would love to see some independent reviews as well.

Thanks for the tip, btw.

ATI is by no means the first to produce a card like this. There has been a PCI HDTV card on
the market for over a year, produced by DVICO. Unlike most cards on the market, that keep the
HDTV stream off the bus, and overlay the video directly onto the vga signal and you don't get to
capture it at all, This card dumps the raw mpeg2 out to you. It will tune over the air HDTV as well
as the HDTV you will get on cable.

The Fusion III just came out last week, I think. It has the hardware capabilities of tuning that holy
grail cable QAM 256, as well as over the air. And you get to play with the raw hdtv data,
and process it however.

www.dvico.com - manufacturer
www.copperbox.com - retailer

A Korean company named DVICO has been working on a QAM HDTV card for a while. They
have released two cards allready, the fusion I and II, which supported over the air HDTV. The
Fusion III just came out last week, I think. It has the hardware capabilities of tuning that holy
grail QAM 256, as well as OTA.

www.dvico.com - manufacturer
www.copperbox.com - retailer