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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 ..."
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.
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."
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.
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.
forgive me for I am no security/encryption afficionado, but, if it's displayed on your screen when you play it, havn't you decrypted it, and I KNOW that there is software out there that will allow you to do a screen capture on this. I'd be worried if it used overlay to do the displaying, but since it's not also a graphics card(although I'm sure some gcards will come with DTV support eventually, or maybe now for all I know), the Decoded stream has to pass through drivers somewhere to get to the card, and those drivers could be hacked.
Pat
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
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).
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.
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?)
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.
That is really just a minor problem. True, the actual framebuffer portion that displays your desktop is not going to have anything but a black/blue/purple/whatevercolor box but still all modern videocards have over 16megs of ram and some of that is going to be used for video overlay buffer.
Before I continue I should say that I programmed most of the v4l-drivers of voodoo 3500 tv so I do know what I'm talking about.
Registers in that videocard are going to point exactly to where that buffer is located and accessing it is no different than just mapping that portion into your address space and copying the data from there. There's going to be a lot of data but technically it is possible. And, this way you'll actually get the clean data instead of something that has already been stretched/filtered/de-interlaced/etc by your graphics card..
To summarize.. If you can see it, it resides somewhere in memory. If you can hear it, it resides somewhere in memory. It might not stay in one place for very long but definetly long enough for someone with intermediate hw-programming skills to capture.