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 ..."

Comments

Re:HDTV Protections?

[thud2000]

According to the article, the recorded video is in fact encrypted - only the specific card that did the recording will be able to play back that particular stream.

They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format

[apnar]

Some work is already underway to reverse the encryption scheme. Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AccessDTV. Not too much activity, but there were some decent things figured out already. Mainly that it looks possible to pull the unencrypted stream from the file.

Also there is another card that does mostly the same thing (no PVR functions) but doesn't encrypt the stream at all called the HiPix

Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format

[Noehre]

Have you ever tried taking a screen capture while playing a DVD?

All you get it a black box.

What the DVD Consortium decided what that a DVD video is sent directly to the video card as an overlay. Basically, the DVD is invisable to the rest of the system. You can't bypass the video somewhere inbetween the disc and the monitor.

I'm sure they can/will/already do something like this with HDTV.

Hard Disk Space

[JohnHegarty]

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.

If I have an HDTV...Can I....?

[swordboy]

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.

Digital TV/Radio musings

[Aztech]

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 :)