PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk)

computer_chacham writes: "Telemann has introduced the first available PCI card for $400 that shows full HDTV resolution on your computer. It also is able to directly take the MPEG-2 HDTV signal, and store it directly on your hard drive. (About 7.7 Gigs/hour, but still ...) It is also able to output to a TV. They have a press release, and a product page. And e-town has a description too." Ready-or-not, if you watch the boob tube, you'll soon be watching HDTV -- compared to buying a new TV set, a card like this seems like a smart idea, especially at the cost of storage today and tomorrow. What are the odds it'll ship with support for any Free OSes?

Comments

Displays and storage...

[baraboom]

Just a few thoughts.... how many people have giant 42"+ tvs, completely incapable of receiving the HDTV signal...

PCI Card: $400.00
80GB Firewire Drive: $380
(http://www.transintl.com)
CPU: $400.00
$1280 conversion kit for any TV....

BTW, to view the HDTV signal I dont think it'd be necessary to record it... so there wouldnt be any additional expense over the card.

Further note on the cheap drives... as soon as I save up $5000, I'm buying a firewire terabyte and attaching it to my iBook. Just cuz.

It'll get deeper

[Anne Marie]

Wait until someone combines it with something like FSCKTV. Presto: perfect digital recordings of descrambled channels. Soon, even the cable companies won't be getting their cut.

Re:It'll get deeper

[cruelworld]

This card is a SMPTE-310M receiver, which means it will only work with terrestrial broadcasts and only with ATSC signals. This means if you can pick up your local NBC station than you can get Leno in HD on your harddrive.

This device will NOT work with DVB or COFDOM signals. this means it won't work with sat. or cable broadcasts, and if the Sinclair group has its way it won't work with anything in a few years.

Note: ASI ingest PCI cards are readily available, so your dreams of unfettered HD cable access are still valid.

If you do buy this card make sure you invest in a decent 2nd gen antenna. 8VSB is a bitch to receive.

It's longevity that's most important, not quality.

[sanemind]

It hardly seems worth using that much storage to my somewhat low fi tastes. Current NTSC resolution is wholly adequate for me. It is the message of the story that really counts, after all. Don't get me wrong, if it was affordable and terabyte scale storage was affordable to the average person, I would be much happier then without it...

But I would be much happier today if I could find a means to permanently archive my wealth of recorded [fair use, wink wink, although it was, afterall broadcast on cable services I subscribed to] media. I have several hundred VHS cassetes of programming [including every simpsons episode, every Pinky and the Brain episode, the State [long since cancelled sketch commedy show], etc. Perhaps not so much with the simpsons. I preserve things that you cannot buy in stores, anywhere, for I do not want them to slip away.

Probably for the same reason I tend to mirror sites I like. The recent flap with the death of Mathworld is a perfect example of the value of archiving. Web sites fit just fine on $0.44 CDR's, and so does music. But video is another beast, and I would be extremely happy if I could ever find an affordable option to digitally archive [even at less then broadcast quality] my videos, which are otherwise quietly degrading into noise.

My point is, that it's not so much ultra quality that matters, but longevity. If only MPG4 would come out, and someone would sell a hardware encoder. Sigh. [You still can't even buy MPG2 encoders for less then several thousand dollars, and MPG2 actually takes up -more- space the MPG1, [although the quality is actually at broadcast level, unlike MPG which isn't even at VHS-EP level.


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man sig

Widescreen

[Malc]

Personally I don't care about HDTV right now. I'd much rather have an affordable wide-screen TV like you can get in Europe. One step at a time, eh?

Besides, why would you want to watch television - even if it is HDTV - on you computer? How many people have big huge 27in computer monitors, or have their monitor somewhere where they can sit and watch it in comfort?

Re:Widescreen

[Goonie]

One step at a time, eh?

One step at a time doesn't really cut it in the world of broadcasting. New formats have to be *huge* improvements over the existing systems, or totally backwards-compatible. Oh, and it helps if they don't cost much more than the old format too.

HDTV fails on so many of these it's not funny, at least in the short term. Given ten years worth of cost-cutting and technology development, maybe.

Telemann usually supports Linux!

[Anne Marie]

Telemann's Sky Media 2000 card has had official linux support for a while now. Since their intended audience surely coincides well with linux users, it'll be an aberration if they don't provide linux support here.

HDTV: still a dream

[Oscarfish]

I know two stations in my area (Washington D.C. / Baltimore, MD) that offer a HDTV signal. Best Buy has nice HDTV sets for $3500 and up, plus an extra $1000 for a box that will accept the signal. And my locla Circuty City has a $3500 HDTV set (Phillips) with a flat screen that's just beautiful...but not really practical.

I just bought a 27" Sony Wega (ruler-flat) tube TV and a I love it. Sony has finally created a set that doesn't look like a tube at all. The set uses a FD Trinitron tube and the front glass essentially acts as a lens, so the screen is both vertically and horizontally flat. I'm using component video inputs (Monster Cable Component Video 3) to my DVD player, and the TV has an anamorphic 16:9 squeeze feature - very cool. It basically squeezes the TV's 4:3 viewing area into that of a 16:9 TV, roughly 1.85:1. I have my DVD player thinking that it's connected to a 16:9 HDTV set, so it sends an anamorphic signal and the TV does the squeezing itself. Anamorphic signal = highest picture quality.

So, until there are many stations that broadcast in HDTV (don't all have to by 2006?), I'll be happy with my Wega. The picture is fantastic.

Link you should check out

[Oscarfish]

There's a really great guide to anamorphic DVDs and their relationship to HDTV sets available online. It goes quite a bit into the emerging HDTV sets, as well as detailing why you should buy DVDs only if they are anamorphic (e.g. enhanced for 16:9 TVs), especially if you ever plan on watching them on a HDTV set (which do have a 16:9 aspect ratio).

The Digital Bits Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD (for Dummies!)

Re:Neat, but not as impressive as the hype indicat

[crysogonus]

From the feature list:
Video Display

• High Definition Display on HD Ready TV or VGA Monitor
• Standard Definition Display on Conventional TV or VCR
• Standard Definition Display on VGA Monitor using VIP 1.1 & Video card

As I understand it, it can either display on a dedicated monitor or (in standard def) using overlay.

MPAA

[mmca]

The MPAA is going to love this...

How long do you think it will be before they sue these guys or force them to add copy protection of some sort?
There are cable/sat channels (HBO for example) that broadcast feature length movies in HDTV, and with this card you can make perfect digital recordings.
Sure you need 15 gigs a movie when you first record them but can can always compress them using DivX or some other codec.

I smell law suit.

Re:Saving to disk

[vheissu]

You could easily then use DivX to compress them to something much more reasonable in size--900 Kbps (smaller case b!) still looks about as good as old school broadcast tv and much better than VCR. Makes things about 400 megs/hr. Plus, when you give a copy to your friend, it doesn't look worse for the wear. I'd be interested to know the legality of doing this off of somewhere like HBO--the quality would be as good as a DVD, right? But you are definitly allowed to tape movies off of HBO and watch them later (unless thats been taken away too.) (ducks as all the film heads come out to decry the end of western civilization as precipitated by digital compressed video)

The difference

[underwhelm]

HDTV is a substandard of the DigitalTV standard, of higher non- and interlaced resolutions.

So you can buy a DigitalTV that doesn't do HD, or you can buy a HDTV that does it all. For now.

Usually you're buying a monitor that is spec'd for its capable resolutions, and you'll buy the tuner seperately, and if you're not using an HD set, somewhere in there scan lines will be discarded. The monitor, I suppose.

Here is Best Buy's attempt at an explanation.

Why lots of people want HDTV on their computer

[hsitz]

Someone said, "Besides, why would you want to watch television - even if it is HDTV - on you computer? How many people have big huge 27in computer monitors, or have their monitor somewhere where they can sit and watch it in comfort?" Believe it or not, there are thousands of people who use their PC as the signal processing center of a home theater system. You can check out the bulletin board of a large user community at http://www.avsforum.com I myself use a PC and its DVD-ROM drive to watch DVD's with stunning results from my Compaq MP1600 projector on a 120 inch diagonal screen. Yes, that's 10 feet. My desire for HDTV on a PC should be obvious. By the way, you can get an excellent XGA projector for home theater for around $3,000. Front projection isn't ideal for everybody, for example you need to watch it in a darkened room for optimal results. But a 10 foot HDTV image for $3k (projector) + $400 PC-Card sure beats the pants off of most other HDTV solutions.

Re:why does hdtv use mpg2 ?

[Ella the Cat]

why to hell use ... an old codec like mpg2

Scientific American for Nov 2000 article "Creating Convergence" page 37 explains very well. MPEG2, unlike many multimedia formats/protocols, has been agreed on worldwide and is used worldwide. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Re:Um... this has been done already.

[vesik]

god, i really should have previewed my post before i posted. so much for a nice first post for me. let me try again.

i don't know where they get off saying they are the 'first', because Hauppage has had a similar card out for a while.

Mandatory Links

http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/h tml /wintv-d.pdf

http://www.hauppage.com/html/products. htm

oh, no!

[Punto]

you mean those hackers will be able to watch DHTV on their computers and save it to their disks so they can watch it again later? oh no!!! let's start suing people!!

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