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

[spudnic]

This is exactly what Total Recorder does (in Windows) for audio. It adds itself as the primary audio driver for the system. All audio directs to it, then it forwards it to the driver for your sound card.

The upshot to this is that you can get Total Recorder to record this stream in just about any format at whatever rate you want.

I use this for the audio books I get from Audible. The books come down in some encrypted format that requires a special plugin for Windows media player or RealPlayer, or you can push them to an Audible enabled device (like the Rio).

Before going to bed, I start the book playing in media player with total recorder saving it out as an mp3 as it goes. The next morning I convert the mp3 to wav and burn it to a standard audio cd.

This type of circumvention is very easy as long as the stream has to be decrypted somewhere on the motherboard. Having the stream sent encoded to the card and having it decrypt it is another matter. I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to decrypt it.