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HDTV On Your PC And Hard Drive
Jack Kolesar writes: "So, you want to watch HDTV but you don't want to shell out thousands of dollars for a new television. Well, AMDPower.com has a review of the AccessDTV HDTV tuner card. Not only does it let you watch HDTV, but you can also record it on your harddrive. Yes, the full 19.4Mbps stream of 8VSB is stored in raw format. Now, if somebody out there could just make some linux drivers for it ..."
Yup. I will donate a whole hour's pay to charity if someone can use their FP to say something worth reading.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
-foxxz
Doesnt Hauppauge (the WinTV people, for which there are already linux drivers) make a HDTV version of their product?
They make a WinTV-PVR, and work is progressing on linux drivers for that thing.
Isn't the MPAA or some other terrorist.. I mean recording organization going to try and ban this? Cuz if you can record it on your hard drive, the evil linux hackers will circumvent the copy protection and redistribute it! Pfft.. *kicks the DMCA and MPAA over to afghanistan*
Can all fish swim?
FWIW, SGI workstations supported the HDTV format for nearly ten years now... In most video and 3D applications, "HDTV" was also an option - for generating content for this "new format."
I think in the future we're going to see a move in volatile memory.
Instead of things being written directly to Harddrives, etc. I think we're going into the error of solid state memory.
Yes, this will lead to big problems if there are power outages etc. but I think this will all be "built in".
The only way this quick retrival is possible is through solid-state solutions...
The current videos can be stored on the solid state memory as they are transferred to large DB on very fast RAID'ed systems. The index, however, will remain in the solid state memory. This will allow for quick access, etc.
but.... we all know how expensive that is, or will be.
So I think until solid-state solutions are affordable, you're not going to have a quick indexing solution.
There comes a point in time where our physical hardware (HD's etc.) can't keep up with the processing bandwidth (sufficiently, that is) and we're going to need solid state solutions to keep up with those speeds.
This is one of those instances.
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
Don't forget to enter our big URL giveaway. Includes a year's free hosting. Are we easy or what?
This is the greatest thing to come to PC in years. Now if only it had an access card slot and a satellite receiver, TiVO would have some serious competition (which, since they still haven't turned a profit, might be a bad thing). I, for one, am tired of dragging out the 36-foot cable every Wednesday to record Enterprise for the guys at work (our UPN station is impossible to receive off-air).
:)
I second the motion for Linux drivers. Imagine a set-top box for the geeks which can play games, do all your usual duties, and all on a screen which is actually readable!
The future is now.
...we could somehow combine this thread and the one for large-scale video archiving to figure out how we can store a full season's worth of HDTV Star Trek...
Ceci n'est pas une sig
The thought of building up a personal A/V library accessable anywhere in my home has always been a dream of mine: I have about 220 CDs (approaching the limit of my custom stereo cabinet designed to hold "enough") and countless VHS video tapes. I HATE contemporary storage solutions: expandable usually means ugly, and elegant (like my stereo cabinet) usually mean limited. If anything, I want original media archived away generally out of site and out of mind. Thus, the desire for a remote, unobtrusive, media server.
Timeshifting broadcast programs to some fraction of this server's space is a natural extention of the idea.
So, such technology would be a welcome addition to my media server idea: besides my main (expensive) HDTV setup, I could have lesser playback equipment in other rooms that could leverage this technology (server side), and perhaps dedicate yet another satellite receiver or two for timeshifting purposes (quite willing to pay another $10 a month for the privelege).
So, bring it on
You could've hired me.
This article was sent by "the wouldn't-it-be-nice dept." but really, it would be more appropriate to be sent by "the now-that's-a-lotta-data dept."
A bunch of posters haven't bothered to read the article and wonder why the MPAA etc don't clobber them. This card encrypts using its serial number, so it can only be played back by itself. If this encryption and decryption happens in the hardware, it might not be feasible to reverse engineer it and get the raw stream.
Infuriate left and right
As this is a 19.4Mbps raw format file. I persume that bits.
So.
19.4 x 1024 = 19865.6 Kbps
19865.6 x 1024 = 20342374.4 Bits Per Second
Now lets divide by 8
20342374.4 / 8 = 2542796.8 Bytes Per Second
2542796.8 / (1024 x 1024) = 2.425 Mega Bytes Per Second
Now, I would like to record a move of 2 hours
2.425 x 60 x 60 x 2 = 17460 MB
or 17460 / 1024 = 17.05 Gb
Thats alot of space , evan for a 80mb hard disk.
Just a question someone might be able to answer, how well will this compress ?
If its a good level of compression, will it allow a new way for the napster type people to break into a new medium.
Cruise TT
If I was to purchase an HDTV, could I use it as a 1920 x 1080 (1080i standard) monitor? I have seen that some of the high end units have DB15 inputs on the back. This would make for the ultimate entertainment center when equipped with any of the new high end Dolby Digital sound cards.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
You must mean like the wall of screens put together to make a huge TV that I always see at Best Buy. I always wondered what those were called.
Going to Best Buy should be fun now...
"Hi sir, may I help you?"
"Yes, how much for that beowulf cluster?"
<blank look>
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I would think this would be a push for non-volatile RAM more than volatile. That way power outages are not a problem and you get the speed of RAM.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
If HDTV is not the new standard, then I wonder where the card maker is going to make the money from. No one I know has HDTV, and only one channel I know of broadcasts in HDTV (and that's the Japanese satellite broadcaster BS1).
from the specs its 1866x1050 at 59hz.
(it said 1050 lines at 16:9 aspect so..)
currently i get all of my tv stations in mpeg2 at around 4.5mbit/sec in 720x540.
i already noticed the bad quality i get is a result from the poor source material (ie 23 hz cinemascope or something ). i wonder what tv shows are actualy being broadcasted in these high resolutions.
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.
This PC Card, like most PC HDTV solutions uses the Teralogic Janus chipset. It's pretty slick, and has actually been aorund for several years. Many major companies use Teralogic, including Tivo.
I've been trying to get information on the chipset from Teralogic for several months. On Dec 29, 1999, David Auld of Teralogic posted to the video-4-linux mailing list. "We at TeraLogic are interested in encouraging the development of Linux
drivers for the Janus DTV card." The company went so far as to offer reference cards and driver sets, and was in favor of having a total GPL driver set. You can do a google search to find the archive.
A couple months ago I e-mailed David on this subject and got a fairly kurt thanks but no thanks response.
The obvious reasons for pulling out support for the Linux driver are all MPAA based. The content controls comming down the pipe won't be in the Janus Chipset. It would have to be software based. With a linux driver could could patch an HD-Tivo, or your Windows based solution to ignore the content control flags. Most interesting would be trying to wield the DMCA against people on this. It's doubtful a linux driver would ever ack the content flags in the first place.
Is there anyone working on any type of decent digital video system. There must be alot of capacity in a standard vhs casset. Could it be used with the HDTV system to encode + compress the data. To then play back on your pc.
Cruise TT
So if I release a device tomorrow without a windows driver, does that constitute another reason not to use windows? Your logic is weak, my son.
Here is the Hauppauge WinTV-D (pdf) linkage.
It appears to do the same thing.
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Just like the Hauppauge DVB boards... I have one here in the UK and the kick ass, Linux TV not only produce Linux drivers for them but a whole suite of utilities that do PVR functionality, time shiting and 'dvbstream' that actually lets you redirect the MPEG2 transport stream to various other PC's over the network.
:)
On a related note, I picked up a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) digtal radio receiver the other day, I can save the MP2 baseband strem directly to disk... no loss of quality, you can actually record all the stations within the same multiplex at once since they all come through the same COFDM transport stream. The datacasts are pretty smooth (and quick) too.. take a look at radio, if they get this into portable devices then this will give 3G a run for its money when it comes to rudimentary information like news, sports scores etc
What line of business are YOU in?
For the rest of us, there's a recession and, oh by the way, planes are falling from the sky, plague is spreading through the land and the world is about to end any day.
I'm saving my (little) money but I noticed that not only are people like renehollin still able to make big ticket purchases, the malls are all still very crowded. The media says recession, but anecdotal evidence would suggest that I'm the only one in this recession. Anyone else hurting?
Compaq's already got it...you can read about it at The Onion
Aaahh, but now I can record it and in times of need, play it again....
You could pull yourself away from the computer for an hour and watch it in the livingroom with your family.
Any idea how much this costs?
...and the THC crystals...
Just be carefull to NOT try to smoke your brand-new HDTV set, mmmkay?
Well, the media says recession any time it'll boost their ratings. Two to three years ago the big news was the stock market and the incredibly good state of the economy.
.com'ers than the US population at large, so perhaps there are some folks who are feeling the pinch.
Having been old enough to be mostly aware of things during the last recession, I'd have to say that the majority of people feel no real ill effects during something like this. If it turns into a 30's style depression, that's a different story.
Most of us, though, have not lost our jobs or received pay cuts, so there's no reason to alter our spending habits. Then again, Slashdot probably has a larger proportion of out-of-work
Myself, I'm not too worried about it. I've recently gotten all the debt from my younger and dumber days paid off. We just recently bought an HD-ready 50" Toshiba TV, but that's probably the last major toy purchase for a while, since there's a little one on the way.
People without piles of consumer debt who live mostly within their means probably shouldn't be afraid of a recession. The worst that can happen is that everyone panics and quits spending; then the economy will really get bad and folks will start losing jobs left and right.
While picking through some of the links at the manufacturer's site, I stumbled across this. Not a bad read. The interesting part is that most HDTVs don't even come close to the 1920 x 1080 standard but rather sample the image down to a lower resolution. Talk about a waste of bandwidth!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I used to test/troubleshoot profesional video equipment. Until I actually saw it I couldn't care less about HDTV. The problem is that true HDTV runs at 1920x1080 (as I recall). Why is that a problem? Because most monitors won't do that.
Most of our test bays used standard computer monitors for output, we ran the signal the signal through a box that stepped down the resolution. I still looked sweet, but it was nothing compared to watching the same signal on a real HDTV monitor.
Granted, most HDTV broadcasts will be at one of the lower resolution standards, so it probably won't matter that much...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
got to page 3, and boom, page not found..wait there it goes...doh its gone again.
:)
"Electric Relaxation" - ATCQ
- Bwana
The NSA still uses and buys SGIs.
...that last week, I couldn't think of anything to fill up that new 100 GB hard drive in under 12 hours.
With the possible exception of high-speed satellite access to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica...
DMCA would not apply to this, and is completely impotent against this.
The capture card itself is what does the encryption. The HDTV signal is sent in the clear, and accessible to anyone who knows how to build the hardware to receive it. Thus, there is no "technological measure that effectively limits access" to the copyrighted content, so 1201 doesn't come into play if you chose to undo (or prevent) the card's encryption.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Half the articles on /. are "Damn the man, fight the RIAA, down with Microsoft!".
The other half are "here's how you, too, can buy into consumerism and give your money to entertainment megacorps, who will use it to buy fascist laws!"
Maybe a bit of consistency would remove this bad taste in my mouth, eh?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Embedded software development. Specifically, right now, big honkin' routers. In previous lives I helped develop POTS test equipment (to test all British Telecom phone lines each night), automated directory assistance systems that employ speech recognition, mobile radio modems, X.25 PADs and switches, and national CD-ROM based telephone/address databases.
After 11 years, it was time to get a new TV. Driving old cars and not paying the "30% depreciation driving a new car off the lot" also helps.
For the rest of us, there's a recession and, oh by the way, planes are falling from the sky, plague is spreading through the land and the world is about to end any day.
Yeah, I know. I left a previous job, sold a house in a horribly overpriced neighborhood, moved to Texas, and bought a cheaper one twice the size. The recession is good for mortgage rates. As for the other "chicken-little" comments, what good would it do to panic? Besides, receiving and paying my bills on-line means I get almost no paper mail, so "hakuna-matata to mail anthrax delivery".
The trick is to keep enough saved up so you can weather the inevitable downturn in the economy, and not live paycheque to paycheque.
You could've hired me.
TV sux anyway, why should I want it in high definition?
Isn't the idea behind storing the shows from TV onto a HD patented by some company ? Its not TiVO, its the ones they got into patent problems with. I can't remeber off hand.
Everyone's bemoaning the fact that these HDTV cards don't have linux drivers and use encryption. Well, is there any reason why we can't just build our own cards?
If the people at SlimDevices can create their own network-based MP3 player with off-the-shelf chips, why can't they (or someone similarly talented) create a little device that takes off-air HDTV signals, feeds it into standard chipsets, and outputs compressed (MPEG-2?) HDTV video over ethernet? Get the little thing responding to simple commands over IP (maybe port 80, just have something in your browser that can handle video/mpeg-2 streams), and you've got a great thing going.
Make 'em cheap, put a few of these in your basement, have 'em all stream to a big RAID box, and then all you need is for the same guys to build a nice ethernet-to-video box for the set-top.
Seriously, though -- how available are these chips? Could someone easily build something that takes "GET CHANNEL 37.3" on an IP port and streams MPEG back? If I recall correctly, off-air HDTV streams are *not* encrypted, right?
What's really cool is that these days I can read a comment like that and not go off to see a friend tonight and succumb to loser-sofa-mode for a month until the bag is empty. Words like that don't trigger a need to get stoopoid with neurotoxins.
Try it. Overcome the urge to get dumb. I did and I'm glad of it.
Off to buy a bottle of Code Red now.... buh-bye....
I was stumped why the parent was modded as troll, because these are close to my thoughts on the matter. [As far as the DMCA and MPAA in Afghanistan, DMCA applies only to businesses doing business in the USA, though political pressure upon foreign manufacturers may be applied. The MPAA isn't relevent in Afghanistan because the Taliban banned all movies and TV, besides, the third world flaunts such things as a habit]
My concern is Microsoft, AT&T, TimeWarner or anyone else dictating right down to the hardware all the standards, circuitry, etc. to make these things work and completely bar recording and replay without buying into some service they offer. I.e. You can rewatch last nights baseball game five years from now, but it's not on your video cassette, DVD or hard drive, rather, it's something that you pay for and they'll retransmit for you, complete with up-to-date advertising inserted. What a boon, eh? No more need for buying piles of recordable media and recording devices. The MPAA is thrilled because they now know exactly what you are watching, through their partnerships with such schemes, but use it to dumb-down film and TV, targetting, always targetting.
There must be some reason I keep watching non-Hollywood films at the Santa Cruz Nickelodeon. Possibly because I've already seen every plot beaten to death by Hollywood, tired of vacuous actors and actresses, weary of bad writing and fatigued by orange fireball explosions, and these alternative films are refreshing and interesting .. nah, I'm probably just a weirdo.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I only check the little case when I deal with sub-standard humans like you.
I was planning to get one of these, years ago, until it was explained to me that these were HDTV for Commercial use, i.e. boardroom slide shows or such. None of the equipment was the same as proposed for consumer use. Is this still the case?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Probably anybody who can afford a 1080i HDTV monitor can afford a $100 video card...
www.clarke.ca
Ummm, guys, this is a problem that was solved 6 years ago. One group I was working with over at Oracle had a ~1.5TB video store, with ~100 realtime inputs, running in testbed to ~20,000 users. In 1995 (yeah - think Pentium 133s as hot machines).
Part of the solution is that you want to convert to a video format, rather than trying to store the raw frames. MPEG-1, -2, -4, or Motion JPeg are probably your best bets. That should get you a fairly large compression factor over the raw frame data set.
Some of this technology is still around, if you know where to look. Email me if you want to chat.
Some regular exposure to Listerine would help.
total oxymoron alert! The REASON it's downsampled is to SAVE BANDWIDTH you fool! Why don't you do the bandwidth maths on 1920x1080x30, they multiply by 24 bits per pixel to see what an uncompressed stream would be like. Now, try and stuff all that down 20Mbps - pretty impressive compresion eh? frequency space filtering is just on little part of the story.
That was classic intercourse!
Because there is lots of good stuff on TV. You might as well ask why the hell anyone would want to read books, see plays, listen to music....
Exactly. I refuse to watch some hackers 1 frame per second solution to this also.
Ditto here - I have a nice full-fiber linked sound system with 800 disk storage, HDTV front projector, etc... In an okay apartment that is close to a bad neighborhood (it's tucked away, though, and the immediate area is full of families). I absolutely credit the additional disposable income to the cheap rent. For a year I lived in a nice house in an upscale neighborhood "appropriate to my income". But I'd much rather have gadgets. To each their own...
But, having an HDTV system, I have been utterly unable to find any "real world" HDTV feeds. DirectTV claims to have some, but I got stalled due to "equipment out of stock" for months. After that, nobody seems to be able to provide anything, and there's nothing even vaguely prosumer or consumer that plays DVDs with an HDTV output (not that I'm really complaining - the local anime club calls my screen "the artifact finder" with just a S-Video cable).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Instead, the reason that TVs flicker less is that TVs have higher-persistence phosphors, i.e. after the phosphors are excited by the CRT's electron gun, the image takes longer to fade away -- a phenomenon that's totally acceptable with full-motion video but not when you don't want your mouse pointer looking smeary.
For proof of this, ask anyone who has a progressive-scan DVD player connected to a progressive-scan TV -- it certainly does not flicker more than a non-progressive scan player (would be somewhat defeatist, no?)
320x200 in AVI DV format (camcorder) is 3 megs per seconds, so this format is not that huge...
Watched Band of Brothers last night in 56" HD
was awsome!
Full Dolby Digital surround sound, cranked!
feel sorry for those that watched it in NTSC
DARK ANGEL!
Okay, the rest of the list:
Smallville
West Wing
any of the Law & Order series
UC: Undercover
ER (though fading fast)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Enterprise (still maturing)
Simpsons
This Old House (shut up, I like it)
many things on BBC America
many things on public tv
many things on various cable channels
So stop being such a tv snob and see what's actually on there. It's not all Jerry Springer, ya know.
I thought that High Definition TV was dead. Digital broadcasting with adaptors for NTSC / PAL had killed it. As somebody said, people prefer more / better content rather than better definition.
Who and where is broadcasting HDTV now?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
They make their money on advertising...
They are not going to encrypt it. Watch all the commercials you want.
I work in TV. It is based on free watching and commercials. Regular TV is not going to become pay-per-view. Because if it was, then someone would come back and give it away for free. That is not how the system will ever work. Anywhere.
If there is encryption, it is a hardware issue... not the transmissions themselves. I think you might be confusing compression with encryption on this one.
Guess how much most cable companies pay for CNN?
Nothin. Find the satellite. Just run the advertisements, please.
I'm usually very polite on
You think the internet controllers are going to sit around while you and your friends pirate every router because you can't set a VCR?
That is a brilliant application for the internet. Definitely what it was designed for. To be your personal movie exchange group, forsaking all others their information so you can get the Berkely Ca advance screening version of Blade Runner.
As for the HDTV satellite feeds, DirectTV has few, and only if you pay for some silly "everything" package. But, I hope this will change over time, so I sprung for the twin dual-LNB 18x24" elliptical dish (besides, it was cheap future-proofing over the standard single dual-LNB 18" dish). I am fortunate in that I can get about 8 local terrestrial DTV broadcasts out of Dallas, TX, and some of them are starting to broadcast in HD. FWIW, I have a Sony 32" HD-ready direct-view set, and HD-DTC100 receiver, purchased from Crutchfield (only $9.95 inside delivery!). I stayed with a 4:3 format because most material my wife watches is still either analog 4:3 or DTV 4:3. We have a horribly large collection of VHS tapes (mostly movies for the kids). The Sony does a nice job of upsampling 480i to either 960i or 480p as well.
I haven't set up a media server yet, primarily because of the lack of a quiet MPEG2 playback device (i.e. not a PC with noisy fans) that looks like a hifi component. I have wired 6 rooms for 2xRG6 and 2xCat5e though, and recently installed a DSL connection. There's nothing like sinking your own email. Headend includes a 8 port 10/100 Mb/s firewall/switch and Trunkline 5x8 multiswitch. Terrestrial DTV is via an attic-located Terk antenna with a ChannelVision 15db RF amp.
You could've hired me.
The FCC is selling off that band to phone companies, who have lots of moolah, and regardless of what happens, the people are getting shafted. There is an issue about this with local TV stations, they are going under spending millions retrofitting stations to a format that maybe has sold 3k television stations nationwide. When you buy a HD television, the station has probably spent $100,000 US per set to get it to you. It is a crime against the businesses. They could've spent that money on content you would have liked. Better news and weather, better local shows. Better sports. Better everything.
How soon we forget about the Indy. Then there's also the O2. Both are "low-end" workstations marketed to people that don't quite need the higher-end stuff and reasonably affordable - even when they were introduced.
The look and feel of Farscape was something that was old hat on Sci Fi channel and syndicated science fiction long before Farscape debuted: angry characters running around yelling at each other on dark poorly-lit sets. The only difference is that there are muppet mushrooms running around. Klingons with dreadlocks? How original.
Pretty much all of the movies on HBO are in HD format. The quality is so good it's like being at a movie theater. Showtime is hit-or-mis on the movies. Both HBO and Showtime have their own series, such as The Sopranos and Leap Years, which are broadcast in high def. I just recently started watching The Sopranos(I didn't have the HBO package until I got my HDTV) and have become hooked - it's an excellent show.
Last night's Disney movie on ABC was Toy Story in HD. Next week will be Toy Story 2. A couple weeks ago they showed A Bugs Life.
PBS has been showing ONLY HD shows on their HD channel - shows on nature, travel, exporation. The travel shows through Europe have been really slick, the detail shown in HD of artwork and buildings is phenominal.
Non-letterboxed DVDs also look great on a HDTV. Any movie that's labeled Anamorphic or Enhanced for Widescreen has 33% more detail when shown on an HDTV. The movie is recorded on the DVD without the black bars. The DVD player will throw out every 4th scan line of the movie on a traditional set and add the letter box bars. See The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD for some good info on anamorphic DVDs.
Ah yes, I used to love watching the Hi-Vision demos in Yamagiwa.
Of course, nobody owns a Hi-Vision TV in Japan:
1) It's analog: Doomed from day 1. NHK shoulda known better. At least now they're trying to convert Hi-Vison to digital.
2) Good for static or slow moving images only. Panning across a crowd results in the image blurring noticeably.
3) Too expensive. Could never be produced in the quantities required for critical mass.
4) The average person doesn't WANT to watch Denpa
Shonen in HDTV!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
What sort of compression are they using?? Even the most optimized Divx codecs aren't that good yet, are they? Say the stream is vanilla 1080i, that's 1920 x 1080 x 16 bit color x 30fps = about 124 MB/sec uncompressed or about 995 Mbps uncompressed. Not including 5.1 or 6.1 channel audio. Compressing that down to a 20 Mbps stream would require a 50:1 codec for the video alone. If it's 24 bit color, the resultant size would be 50% larger and thus require a 75:1 codec.
So what sorta compression codecs are they using? Please excuse my ignorance as I have never worked with compressed HDTV. My only experience has been on the production end where we used SGI Octane2 and Onyx2 systems with the Snowball DM2/DM3 I/O cards fo uncompressed work. Of course, that required a full rack of Ciprico fibre disk arrays to store the data, but the quality was awesome. On the software end, we used IFX's 'Piranha HD' and Discreet's 'Inferno'.
I have Showtime and HBO stations that say they are HDTV. Will this card or one of the Hauppauge cards give me 1080i on my monitor through the coaxial cable or do these cards only work with satellite and antennas that pick up the local HD stations for ABC, CBS, and NBC? I am having a hard time getting a clear explanation on any websites. I can never find anything that explains how this works with a cable service.
"I see. The fact that you . . . can't explain . . . explains everything."
I am surprized that noone mentioned the Hipix-200 from Telemann.
There are currently three HDTV cards:
AccessDTV This one encripts its data and attempts to get you to subscribe to their TV Listing service
Hauppage This card does not encript the data, but its software sucks.
Telemann This card does not encript the data, and the software doesn't suck. It aint perfect, but it is usable.
There is more info at www.avsforum.com where useres of these boards are discussing their merrits.
The new Pioneer DVD-RW drive sounds like a perfect match for this. Only 4.7gb per disk though so it can only hold 1/2 hour!
I don't think HDTV is really dead. I have seen some 16:9 aspect ratio demos going on in the department stores with over the air pictures. Not every program will go this way (thank god! who wants 'soaps' in hi-def!) but the football games are being broadcast that way! (Then again is it worth it to see the Miami Dolphins loose in high def? Maybe....if you are a Jet's fan).
Please explain what "HDTV" means to you. 10 years ago, SGI could only have supported high definition ANALOG TV, not the high definition DIGITAL TV as defined today.
HDTV as currently defined uses the MPEG-2 compression algorithm which was not standardized until 1995.
Not sure when it's due out, but a google search yeilds a list price of $1049. Not bad - that's what my SVHS deck ran me way back when(late 80s?).
It's going to hook up via firewire - which my set doesn't have. I've heard there will be a plug-in board for the set though which adds the firewire port(s).
You are absolutely wrong here.
The $5,000 HDTV sets do not have the a resolution capable of supporting 1960x1080. E.g. the Sony 36" HDTV's only have a 600 horizontal line resolution. Yet they are still capable of "displaying" 1960x1080 as they downsample the video. This has nothing to do with saving bandwidth as broadcasters that transmit HD in 1080i (1960x1080) send all of that data in a 19Mbps stream.
It's only the really, really expensive HDTV sets that have the resolution to support true 1960x1080
Not quite. DV is 720x480 interlaced and works out to about 3.6MB/s.
-matt
My ~$3,000 Toshiba 65" HDTV has 1600 lines of resoultion and supports 1080i natively.
1080i doesn't take any more bandwidth than 540p.
you're missing the point. HD might start at 1920x1080, but is severely low-passed during the compression process. i THINK that the best case still image maximum is actually 1440 pixels, and typical program material is significantly lower. so, unless you plan on doing uncompressed post-production with your monitor/TV, you needn't worry about your screens addressable resolution too much. Find a set with good colour and geometry and you're four fifths of the way there.
That was classic intercourse!
"Because there are only a couple chipsets that do it in the first place."
It could still be done. Might take a few more chips but still...
Well lets start on the same page. I'm talking about terrestrial broadcasters. CBS in Los Angeles transmits their 1080i signal at the full 1080x1920 resolution. There have not been any indications in the industry journals to the contrary.
:)
I think you might be thinking of DirecTV. They started broadcasting 1080i video, but low-passed to 1080x1280 in order to lower the bandwidth so that they could fit two HD channels into a single transponder.
And I agree with you on the colour and geometry issue. But you have to admit, the really expensive HD sets that are capable of true 1080x1920 and 720p look amazing
My $1,700 47" Panasonic also supports 1080i natively, but it still has less than 1920x1080 in actual screen resolution...
Yes, your set does support 1080i natively... and it may have 1600 lines of resolution, but are these normalized ? Here is a post by "edyee" on [Home Theater Spot] describing the resolution issue.
"Panansonic's quoted resolution is 850 lines of horizontal resolution (# of light/dark transitions horizontally that be discerned, not the number of scan lines). And further, if this is quoted as 850 lines of horizontal resolution per picture height, the total number of lines across the 16:9 screen would be 850x1.78 or approx 1500. The question is what is Mitsubishi's quote of 1200 in relation to? Is it the total across the screen or is it also lines per picture height? If it is not lines/pic height, then normalizing Mitsubishi's number gives about 674. And Panasonic has greater horizontal resolution."
With two of these HDTV hardware codecs, one could make an SVGA Head-Mounted-Display _wireless_ cheaply. Just combine your HDTV hard codecs with the Interstil Prism Indigo, a 54Mb/s wireless LAN, and you're ready to rock.
-nb
And flaunting them (putting them out where the public is exposed to them, even if it's only yourself in your own home) is what enrages people like the Taliban. Flouting them (the IP laws about unauthorized copies) is what enrages people like the MPAA and the RIAA.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If you've got a little one on the way the major toy purchases are only beginning. They just won't be your toys. Seriously, before you know it that kid'll be big enough that the 50" set and he or she will need protecting from each other (kid damages TV, kid topples TV stand and gets crushed), so plan ahead to keep them apart without resorting to barbed wire and landmines.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Except for gadgets like lawnmowers, etc.? :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A movie would look TERRIBLE at the "right" frame rate of 24 FPS. The reason for this is that the effective framerate of a standard film on a standard projector is really 48 FPS.
Basically, it was discovered early on in creating the film medium that anything 30 FPS or above tends to look fairly smooth and natural in movement, and around 50 FPS and above looks very smooth and natural, but the 24 FPS of standard film looks jerky and unnatural when there's a lot of movement involved.
So, that's why the "flicker" of the movie projectors was introduced. Rather than waste an extra 6 FPS of very expensive film stock, which adds up quickly, to get the smooth motion of 30 FPS, it was discovered that introducing a very brief flicker in the middle of each frame--originally produced by passing a small wire or small disc or square of metal through the aperture of the projector 24 times per second, spaced timewise in the middle of each frame--would produce an optical effect which "tricked" the brain of the viewer into seeing the film at 48 FPS. Motion looked smooth enough because each frame was being interrupted by the flicker, so that the brain of the viewer would naturally group half of two frames together and create the sense of movement, instead of grouping it frame by frame and seeing the choppiness. An optical illusion, really. This is continued to the present day in every standard film projector, in one way or another.
So, seeing a "flat" 24 FPS film without the flicker would show the true choppiness of this very old format which lacks a high enough frame rate.
The easiest way to see this yourself is to find a high quality movie on the Net encoded at 25 FPS progressive from a deinterlaced PAL source, which is of course normally 25 FPS interlaced. People used to watching NTSC 30 FPS (29.97, but close enough) video on their monitors will definitely notice the difference in scenes involving fast motion. That extra 5 FPS is at an important threshold, as any PC gamer could tell you.
Of course, both NTSC and PAL use the trick of interlacing to make motion look even smoother, bringing the effective frame rates up to 60 FPS and 50 FPS respectively. This looked wonderful on standard TV sets, which lacked high resolution and make the signal into a more diffuse and softened display anyway; but it becomes a problem when the material is shown in its original interlaced form on a high definition monitor and looks pretty bad, or gets deinterlaced and the motion appears choppy (for PAL at least). Definitely a problem.
But film, at 24 FPS, would look even worse on a high definition monitor in its natural raw format, in terms of motion looking choppy. It would be noticeably like the purposefully choppy scenes in *Gladiator*--not quite so bad, but still not good. The ideal solution would be to present films in their original 24 FPS speed, but with the display introducing a minute "artificial flicker" to produce the same optical effect we get at the theater with projectors.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
A bit further OT, but wouldn't chucking your mail in the microwave for a bit before opening kill any anthrax spores?
You would probably have to be extremely paranoid to do this but better safe than sorry.
I personally hate linux and don't know why any hardware person would want to run it. It has support for practically no hardware.
Windows XP is the way to go!