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A HD capture card where the signal is then transmitted through RF?

At first sounds like someone recording a symphony for an eventual release on SACD but then using their mom's answering machine to record the concert.

I looked into it a bit more. The RF is actually a coaxial input. Which means it's the same exact input you'd get from, say, Comcast or your local cable provider. I don't have time to do a lot of research but isn't this what you're looking for? Is there something I'm missing?

can be found here. It also gets regular TV signals. Dunno if it does HD over cable or not, but if you want linux support, this is It.

Work with systems integrators that are willing to put MythTV on a silent fanless system with a pcHDTV card and your video card/chip.

This is something I have been planning on doing myself for several months now--a silent MythTV HTPC capable of HiDef PVR functionality, in a small form factor case if possible. It would have HD * SD tuners, HDTV and SDTV output... (Project on hold for the moment for lack of funds.) I foresee several hurdles, so it would be cool to see someone (a system integrator no less) working on this very thing!

Considering how the pcHDTV card has sold (out), the parent poster's suggestion sounds like a really cool (niche) market to me!

The folks over at pchdtv.com are now taking orders for the new HD-3000 *linux only* HDTV video capture card.

And yes, they are working on QAM digital cable support for this new card. Here is a nice FAQ about what is new in this card.

The folks over at pchdtv.com are now taking orders for the new HD-3000 *linux only* HDTV video capture card.

And yes, they are working on QAM digital cable support for this new card. Here is a nice FAQ about what is new in this card.

A path that could be very fruitful is to design a video card to be used in a TiVo-like device. In particular, in addition to the good suggestions involving the Render and Damage extensions, a 2D-only card should do some hardware accelerating of IDCT and motion compensation, so that i.e. DVD's and MPEG-4 files can be played with a very minimal CPU. Work with systems integrators that are willing to put MythTV on a silent fanless system with a pcHDTV card and your video card/chip. This could be a good way to go for smaller but demonstrated market, where the part is easier to design than a 3D-nvidia-ati competing beast. Actually doing the video and TV on the same part is a good idea, if it can be done, since these machines are usually space and PCI-slot constrained.

I do not think, out of the gate on a small budget is reasonable or feasable to get a 3D part. It would be better to start small, and plan some features for the second generation. For funding, take pre-orders. Oh and hype the shit out of it, on slashdot.

Secondly, how feasable is it to put a cheap off-the-shelf CPU on the part to handle the 3D workload. Certainly that's faster and cheaper than a FPGA. CPU's with MMX or Altivec instructions can be had in the 1-2 GHz range for < $50.

-- Bob

I've got two such cards, one is Linux only and the other is Windows only. But since they both save the raw bitstream coming from over the air, files can be played back from both cards without modification.

They're in separate systems and have access via NFS and SMB to a RAID array to save/playback all programming.

Interestingly, they've promised to come out with a next generation card, the HD-3000.

For a long time it's been promised to come RSN, with pre-orders expected to be taken starting September 15.

That was yesterday.

Now, pre-orders are expected to be taken starting September 22, with production and shipping a month later.

I have two TiVo's that I like now (loaded to 200 GB on one) but an HDTV flat panel is in my near future (the Sharp 46 in LCD looks nice) and I'm like to try MythTV with one of these pcHDTV cards, a couple of Hauppage 350's, and lots of disk space.

What would be really nice is a quiet, black consumer box form factor case that could take all this and sit inside my stereo cabinet...

There's a fair amount of documentation over at mythtv.org, and even more extensive hardware specs (alot of which was written by your truly - please edit it if you disagree!) over at the Myth wiki hardware section http://mythtv.info/moin.cgi/HardWare.

I'm based in the UK so don't know much about HDTV, but IIRC the only HDTV card that'll work under Linux (and Linux only) is available from PCHDTV http://pchdtv.com/

One example (although for over the air ATSC DTV signals)

pcHDTV HD-2000

seems to be sold out (which is good and bad)

e.

I was kind of hoping that one of these vendors would step up to bat in the Linux world. But I guess that I am one of many, especially here in /. world. I just hope these windows cards are less buggy than the ATI ALL-In-Wonder cards have traditionally been. Time will tell!

There is one: the HD-2000, from pcHDTV -- it's the world's first Linux-only TV tuner card, and it supports both NTSC (analog) and ATSC (digital) broadcasts.

Right now, they're selling out the last of their HD-2000 cards to make room for the HD-3000. It's speculated that the HD-3000 adds support for digital cable, but there's nothing definite.

The great company pcHDTV http://www.pchdtv.com/ that gave us the HD-2000 Linux HDTV tuner card will be releasing a new card called the HD-3000. The new card is reported to have support for QAM "out of the box". Also to note, the HD-2000 is QAM capable, but no one has written this part of the driver yet.

This link has been around for a while. Does anyone have any experience with this card, and the drivers under linux ?

You mean like the GPL'd MythTV ?

Yeah it runs on linux(QT), so it's a little hard to set up, but it runs well, downloads TV schedules for free, supports multiple tuners and a wide range of cards including pcHDTV

From the processor requirements and load, I'm betting the mpeg decoder is in software. I bet the only thing in the box is the HDTV tuner and firewire interface.

That makes it $100 more than the pci card tuner for linux , which is about what I would expect for the external support circuits, enclosure, and Mac markup.

Have you seen the pcHDTV (HD-2000) tuner card?
It is <$200, and is Linux-only! Many are making a decent HDTV system using it...

As a side note, which card do people recommend to watch HDTV with Linux ?

I was excited about ATI's card for a few minutes too until I saw the screenshots and realized that since it is from ATI it will require Microsoft's Windows to do anything with it. I was hoping it was more like a hardware device with maybe a webserver interface to control it and the picture digitally overlayed on an SVGA signal. Thanks for the mention of pcHDTV since I hadn't heard of it before. But you said ther are no Linux HDTV cards that can do air, cable and satellite HDTV. I am clueless about HDTV. Can you tell me why the coaxial input on the pchdtv won't work for all these? And do I understand right that this card will work with normal TV signals just as easily as with HDTV? What exactly is it missing?

For Linux I just picked up a pchdtv card. It wasn't too bad to set up, and is capturing HDTV off the air ("for free") fine. I need a better antenna, but I knew that when I bought the card.

pcHDTV

Doesn't work with cable or satellite (not sure if this is a hardware or driver limitation) but can decode both NTSC and HDTV. Completely open platform, so completely open drivers.

DVB doesn't work in the US, does it? I think we Americans are pretty much stuck with analog reception of everything that's not over-the-air HDTV. For HDTV we have pchdtv, which works with Linux and captures a straight MPEG stream like you said. For cable, satellite, and over-the-air analog, we're stuck with capture cards like the BT8*8 and PVR-250. Analog capture works well enough to be watchable and can be encoded easily in real time on a modern (e.g., 2 GHz+) PC.

... Even this the site for this video card says it ...

My old coworker and friend uses this card and loves it, he just wishes he had better reception to get the HD channels in his area.

Recall that all of these efforts are standard definition television. Despite the nay-sayers, high definition television is indeed a reality, and has Linux support thanks to the HD-2000 card, which I'm happy to report has no support for Windows.

What a breath of fresh air. Now, back to watching hard-disk recordings of Alias featuring the supremely-cute Jennifer Gartner, who, in high-def, has many supremely-cute freckles.

Hmm.

Having grown up a fair distance from most of the TV channels (probably no towers were less than 50 miles from us except maybe one), yet being able to view 15-20 channels with a large yagi antenna, I am concerned about this. Well, heck, I'm concerned about HDTV reception too.

I grew up in southeast Minnesota, near Rochester (where the Mayo Clinic is), though the town I was in was one of the highest regions of land in the area. My family mostly pointed our antenna northward at the Twin Cities, from which we could receive eight major channels (well, except when the weather was bad): 2 (PBS), 4 (CBS), 5 (ABC), 9 (was UPN, now Fox), 11 (NBC), 17 (PBS), 23 (now WB, and the infamous originator of MST3K), 29 (was Fox, now UPN). As the PAX network started up, we could sometimes see 41 from St. Cloud.

When the weather was bad, or annoying things like late-running baseball games took up a Cities channel, various other options were available by turning the antenna. CBS stations were also available from Iowa and Wisconsin. There was an ABC affiliate near the Minnesota/Iowa border, and the local NBC affiliate's tower was not far from the border either. Several PBS stations were able to be picked up to the east, west, and south.

Recently, I experimented with receiving HDTV signals with a Linux-compatible pcHDTV card. I was really annoyed to see that we had to directly point our antenna at the transmission tower to have any hope of picking up a signal. In the analog days, it was at least possible to get the gist of what was happening on most channels, even if they weren't aimed at directly by the antenna. Channel surfing at my parents' place is going to get a lot more dull (it wasn't great to begin with ;-)

HDTV transmitters (at the moment, at least) put out significantly less power than their analog counterparts. Theoretically, the same coverage is available with this lower power, but as I described, I think the FCC has a different idea of what reception and coverage actually are compared to what I think they are.

Then again, the pcHDTV card probably has a relatively poor tuner, but I definitely worry about it.

I think Michael Powell has said a few times that he things that "Free TV" (over-the-air broadcasts) are going the way of the dodo. Certainly, many people have been more interested in cable and satellite, but there is a loss of local flavor in that arrangement. I certainly credit a lot of my education and interest in science and technology to the availability of several PBS channels in my area. Even now, I live in Minneapolis, where I cringe when I think that only two PBS stations are available (well, you can say that more are available when the HDTV sub-channels are considered, but the programming on those doesn't really interest me at the moment).

Anyway, I just feel that the FCC probably won't properly answer this question. Maybe they will, but I have significant doubts.

http://www.pchdtv.com sells a Linux HDTV tuner card. There is some support for MythTV with this card.

I use an HDTV tuner card for off-the-air HDTV, and a Hauppauge 350 card (in the same computer) for cable/analog TV.

It is a little tricky getting the drivers to live together, but I found a handy howto on getting it done (sorry, I don't have the link handy, but check out the mythtv forums, pcHDTV forums, and ivtv driver lists for details.

Far easier, if you have more than one computer, is to have your HDTV tuner card in one and your hauppauge card in a second. Mythtv allows you to use one seamless interface for multiple backend recorders, giving you the best of all possible worlds with a lot less manual hacking than is required if you try to combine all of the hardware into one box (this was ultimately my preferred solution, though you CAN make the hardware all work together with a little blood and sweat).

It is a bit of work getting all of this working seamlessly, but having control of your own hardware (rather than giving such control to the MPAA or another third party) makes it well worth the time.

beware the pchdtv...it doesn't work with cable tv, which really limits its usefulness, imo.

http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000012

On an off-topic note - what Linux HDTV tuner do you use, and how open are the drivers?

I use a PC HDTV card. The drivers are free software (GPLed) and available online (they are v4l2 based, rather than v4l, but can be made to work with mythtv and xine-hd).

Buy 'em early and often ... who knows how long before the thugs in Washington ban the technology outright.

I have not tried it myself, but you should be able to use the pcHDTV card. It's an HDTV card designed specifically for linux. It won't solve the cable-box problem, but it does support the OTA broadcasts.

It has been supported to some degree in MythTV since October (v0.12), and with continued updates since then (v0.13, v0.14).

Nobody's probably going to see this since I posted it so late, but this was brought up at our last LUG meeting -- it's a PCI HD TV card made especially for Linux. All the drivers are open-source, etc, etc. Check it out: http://www.pchdtv.com/

You already can... it's called the Linux pcHDTV card. And no one will ever be able to make a card or other recording device with component inputs due to the copyright issues.

There have been PCI HDTV cards for years that receive OTA HD. Even a cheap one that only works in Linux!

MythTV

Find me a third party DVR that does all that!

Finally, I settled on buying a computer to do all of this. I had quite a few of the parts I needed; the only thing I was missing was an OTA tuner card, the DVD software, and the sound card. I already had decided on Windows XP (which I will explain below), so I was set.

The DVD software I went with was called TheaterTek and the benefits it had over a standard player are numerous:

• Ability to resize any move to any resolution including 1080i
• Ability to expand the movie to get rid of the black bars around the edge (i.e. anamorphic widescreen)
• Ability to save these changes for each individual movie
• Using Windows to further enhance the output using various filters (i.e. fdshow filters)

The other problem was getting the actual HD content from the main networks. Locally in Omaha, NE ABC, CBS, and NBC have been broadcasting in HD for a while, so an OTA tuner was the way to go. A stand alone box was going for $600 locally, and I had found a card that does it for $200, the MyHD OTA Tuner Card. The picture quality is incredible and the performance was great on my 850 Duron. It gave me everything the set top box would have done and also Tivo like functionality out of the box, something that still isn't available for HD yet.

As I mentioned before, I went with Windows XP as everything mentioned above is only available for that platform. Also, due to the mature video drivers on Win32 vs. Linux for the ATI card I went with, I was able to tweak more aspects of the output to the HD monitor through a program called Powerstrip. I tried DVD playback on Linux (mplayer), but it had no where near the functionality of the Theatertek software. Also, I did look into the pcHDTV card available, but it isn't nearly has mature as it should be for a commercial HD tuner card (the only user fiendly app I have found, MythTV, has very limited integration with the pcHDTV card. That is changing quickly, though).

All in all, I highly recommend making a HTPC if you have the time. Plus, you don't need that Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition crap to make it work, just plain old XP will do you fine.

No, buy this card. Linux support!! And MythTV is adding support.

This is similar to the current situation with Quicktime, Real and WMV playback on Linux - there is a technical solution, but it is illegal. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that the companies developing these secret formats will ever port to Linux, and even less likely that they will make them open source.

Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.

Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.

You mean like this?

A broadcast flag is meaningless given that there are a number of solutions that already ignore it. I happen to have three such systems:

1. Samsung SIR-T150 ATSC receiver, not known to recognize broadcast flag or de-rez component analog outputs.

2. MyHD MDP-100 ATSC receiver card, not known to recognize broadcast flag or de-rez component analog outputs.

3. HD-2000 Linux Only ATSC receiver card, with source code, which does not recognize broadcast flag, and can be reprogrammed to ignore it.

And of course there's GNU Radio, a software only system to receiving, processing, and decoding digital television (and other kinds of) broadcasts, which can ignore the broadcast flag.

The only way a broadcast flag will be useful is if the FCC, the MPAA, and our in-the-pocket politicians take the next logical step: make ignoring it illegal.

Or, just leave it to the community to do what they do best: provide drivers that are more efficient and more stable than anything some random company would halfheartedly put out in an attempt to win over a few thousand more sales.

Look, it's pretty simple:

1. Jennifer Garner of Alias has lots of super-cute freckles.

2. Those super-cute freckles are only visible on the local HDTV broadcast.

3. This box doesn't do HDTV.

Luckily, there is an ATSC receiver card that's for Linux only that does do HDTV. And Jennifer Garner. And her super-cute freckles. And yes, it's quite hackable, and source is included.

'nuff said.