HDTV Reception Now Available on Linux

-tji writes "A new company, www.pchdtv.com, has just released the first digital TV receiver card for Linux. Along with the Linux drivers, they have also modified xine to support HD playback and add XvMC support for MPEG2 hardware acceleration with some video cards. This has great potential for integration into PVR apps, like freevo and mythtv. There is also another project to reverse engineer drivers for the Teralogic TL880 based DTV cards. The one active developer has done a great job, but could use some help."

Comments

TOASER!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

toaster,toaster toaser, do you have toast in you yet i think
so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Im not a toaster!!!!!!!!!!And one more
thing........YOUR A TOASER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND A COOKIE WITH MILK SOAGE
MILK!!!!!!!!!!AND A BUTT WITH POOP IN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yay

[CableModemSniper]

go pchdtv.

Re:Yay

[blue_collar_man]

So many toys, so little money.

I suppose I could go without food for a few days. =-)

Re:Yay

[eyepeepackets]

Yes, that's the big downside of all these U.S.-based companies shipping as much of their production/labor overseas as they possibly can, all the while hoping to make big profits bringing back their products here to sell: Can you say "gutted consumer base?"

Otherwise, I hope this company's product is more robust than their website which seems to have gone t.u. very, very early in the /.ing process.

Re:Yay

[blue_collar_man]

Very true. Imagine the price if us Americans made them.

It is unfortunate and will always be a no win situation. Prices too high if they don't go overseas, bad PR if they do.

Show me an equivelent product that is made in the USA with Linux drivers and I'll buy it instead. (Assuming the price/performance is comparable)

Re:Yay

[CableModemSniper]

Enthuisum == Flamebait?

Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

But are the drivers open source? I couldn't imagine running binary drivers on my Gentoo. Why can't these people just "get it" already?

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you compile them, they'll be in BINARY FORM won't they???

Re:Drivers

[Oceanman]

After you compile them, they'll be binary drivers, fucktard. Geez, can't you open source losers THINK?

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha-ha. Very funny. You know perfectly well what I mean.

If I can't see the source code, it's not going on my system because of both ethical (buying binary only drivers encourages code hoarding) and security reasons. That's why I don't buy NVidia GFX cards and neither should you.

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I don't buy NVidia GFX cards and neither should you.

Open source software is crappy and never works. That's why I never use it and neither should you.

See how easy it is to make some crap up and then tell other prople what to do?

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh really? And just how is free software crappy? What particular software does not work? Huh? I thought so. You're just bashing the community because you missed the greatest revolution in computing since the invention of the microprocessor.

Re:Drivers

[toddestan]

Not every company is willing to open source all their software and make it free. If we want many of the commercial software companies to take Linux seriously, we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.

Until then, they will continue to develop only for OSes like Windows and MacOS.

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a life, loser.

Thanks!

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

If we want many of the commercial software companies to take Linux seriously

That's a pretty big "if".

I am not convinced at all that we need the commercial software companies so badly that we sell our ideals for it.

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome, emacs, sendmail......

Re:Drivers

[listen]

we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.

What you meant to say was:

We need to communicate that we are willing to give up our freedom and put up with binary crapware, just as long as we can use our leet new toys.


Some of us care more about freedom than HDTV. We need to encourage hardware companies to open their specs. Linux is not alone in the world as an alternative OS, and I sure as fuck hope that something better does come along some day. I don't think we want to be stuck emulating shifting Linux kernel interfaces to use some hardware on our shiny new EROS boxes ( yeah, right) in 2010.

Re:Drivers

[justsomebody]

I find that very acceptable. But you made a magic mistake.

driver!=software

I for one write just as OSS as proprietary (both for Linux). The only real need in being open is to be open to correct extent.

If drivers are proprietary and company goes to drain, your hardware goes with company too. Just look at older TV Tuners under XP. No drivers no fun. But if drivers are made as OSS someone might continue to support your hardware even then.

As far as I was talking about sotware needing to be open to the correct extent. Take two this as example.
Accounting software >> can be proprietary, the only thing that must be open are correctly documented tables and their relations.
Software for editing some type of file >> Make a complete specification of document type.

There are points that company must revise.
1. What will happen if they go down with their customers, I was there and to tell you the truth as a customer I didn't liked it. That's why I had to drag one machine running Win3.1 until a year ago, It was the only possibility to access documents that were made.
2. Let's take something more simple now. You're the one man band and you're administering servers on companies. You die in a car crash. Do customers have to break in to continue to work. Or would it be more simple to use an envelope, write password in and protect it to be used just in case.

As far as paying, my customers were paying me when I was making Win software, and they are paying me now. Where's the difference?

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs is used by millions and millions of users throughout the world to code, write scientific papers and sending e-mails. Sendmail is the veritable backbone of the internet mail. Gnome is getting along very well and will be the easiest GUI to use ever made.

Your point?

Re:Drivers

[jgilbert]

If we want many of the commercial software companies to take Linux seriously, we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.

I'm willing to pay for software, just not when it's proprietary. I'll only play for Free Software.

Re:Drivers

[justsomebody]

I'm willing to pay for software, just not when it's proprietary. I'll only play for Free Software.

Doesn't this funny sound strikes you?
Pay for free???

You probably meant Open Source;)

Re:Drivers

[wasabii]

Free as in speech software. Open Source is an entirely different thing.

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, please. Can you actually read source code?

I didn't think so. Next!

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

ethical (buying binary only drivers encourages code hoarding)

Bwaaahaha! That's a good one. "Code hoarding." Nice buzzphrase. Very good. Excellent. Way to subvert the English language to advance your fucked-up agenda.

In other news, exchanging goods encourages value hoarding, so remember to never conduct any transaction ever!

Re:Drivers

[runderwo]

Not every company is willing to open source all their software and make it free.

Right, well, if I pay for a piece of software that I depend on to make use of hardware that I've purchased, I want the source code so that I can make sure it continues to work for my purposes.

Just because they would deliver the source code with their product doesn't make it "Free", unless they specifically relinquish redistribution rights to the user of the software. That may or may not fit within their business model and is their choice to make. However, depriving the user of the source code is to maintain control over the user.

Re:Drivers

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

Its not about selling your ideals, unless you're as fanatic as RMS and try to change the world no matter what.

For all other people, it's just about living together with people who have different ideals.

Re:Drivers

[justsomebody]

So if I understand correctly this attitude.

One should write a software that's free. After that he hopes that there would be enough people making donations to put bread on the table.

I was controversing parent post about OSS or not. But in case of your attitude I actualy agree that parent had right and I was the one that was wrong.

It is a differece when someone provides distro like Redhat, than some coder writes a small software and hopes it will be seen enough to be appreciated so people would donate him some money.

After turning your opinion into reality:
Does job like a coder still exist. NO
1. No! They are not coders professionaly because they need other line of work to support themselves, they are called hobby-coders
2. Yes it does, but it's now called beggar

Fact1: Coder can't benefite of their work (other than being supported from users like you), they don't have the right that users have (just to use, not code anything and benefit from that).
Fact2: Red cross will support from now on coders too

I write just as OSS under GPL as closed source commercial (with full specs), and I appreciate GPL as far as it gets, but funny I can't find your point.

Re:Drivers

[pyite69]

You can download the contents of the CDROM from
their web site. It includes full GPL source for
the driver and Xine.

Research first, then post your inane complaints.

Re:Drivers

[Nucleon500]

People are perfectly willing to pay for software if it does something they need, even people using Linux. Examples would be office software, servers, databases, desktop integration, and games. This is becoming even more true as companies and non-geeks use Linux more.

But hardware companies aren't selling software, they're selling hardware! The software is only provided to make the hardware work so people will buy it. And while an open source driver will be maintained and supported by the community, may be put in the vanilla tree, and will make the community like you, a closed source driver is a support nightmare, it's very difficult to deploy use, and it's only slightly better than nothing at all.

Re:Drivers

[Kjella]

Just because they would deliver the source code with their product doesn't make it "Free", unless they specifically relinquish redistribution rights to the user of the software. That may or may not fit within their business model and is their choice to make. However, depriving the user of the source code is to maintain control over the user.

Except that with the source, anyone is free to create e.g. pre-rooted versions with ease. Think something like Windows with a hidden backdoor that'll bypass any software firewall? Post that to warez groups and claim the CRC change is because of the anti-activation stuff. Wouldn't even have to show up on a scanner - make it only open up to a "magic sequence" of rejected packets. Voila - you suddenly have the perfect backdoor.

Sure, the same could happen with Linux. But there it is a web of trust in force, official CRCs to check against. Nothing like that exists for closed source products, because the company itself is distributing it, noone else. Naturally, such trojaned versions be very bad for the parent company.

Not to mention stuff like ripping them off would be easier (copy-paste "programming" for closed source programs), as well as what various bad patches people could apply (with the source, people could make small binary patches for other people). "KaZaA b005t3r! Make your downloads 100% faster" which is really a backdoor etc.

Another thing, is that those companies could end up in lots of legal battles (copyrights, patented algorithms etc.) that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Even things that have a clean bill of health could draw legal attention, as with the latest SCOs malloc antics.

So I see very real reasons for closed source companies not to release their code. In the world where everybody plays nice it'd be fine, but as it is I'd call it a very poor business decision.

Kjella

Re:Drivers

[-tji]

Yes, all the drivers and applications from this company are 100% open source. They provide the drivers only in source form, with easy instructions on how to build them. All the software is a available for download on their web site with no form of registration, purchase, etc. (it's all GPL'd code).

As for the Nvidia cards, that's a different issue.. Those cards are recommended because Nvidia has provided Linux drivers that implement the XvMC API for MPEG2 acceleration. This makes it feasible to do Hi-Def video on a reasonable processor.

ATI also has this capability in their Radeon hardware. But, they will not provide Linux drivers that enable this capability.

Also, on the other project listed there, to reverse engineer the Teralogic cards, ATI has refused to give ANY help/specs/API's/drivers for the NXT2000 ATSC demodulator on some of those cards. So, they are not exactly Linux-friendly either.

Re:Drivers

[The Clockwork Troll]

Sendmail is the veritable backbone of the internet mail.

What does that make spam? Osteoporosis or viral meningitis?

Re:Drivers

[jmorris42]

> Not every company is willing to open source all their software and
> make it free.

I'm down with that. They can be as closed as they want, it is a free country. But if they want me to BUY their hardware they have to do it on my terms. And my terms are Free/Open source drivers. I will NOT buy closed hardware again. Been there, done that and have the lousy t-shirt. Never again.

However I will buy closed source software. Provided it isn't important and has little longterm value.... i.e. games. Closed software mixed with a Free OS is a timebomb. It bitrots very quickly. I had hell getting VMWare 2 running on RH7.2 and it broke again when I went to 7.3 and I still haven't had the time to get it running again. Needless to say I don't depend on VMWare. It won't be much longer before it just doesn't work at all, probably when the 2.6 kernel becomes standard. And I'm not just picking on VMWare, any closed app suffers the same fate eventually. With a game it usually doesn't matter since I will have moved on to the next shiny toy.

Re:Drivers

[SuiteSisterMary]

Sure, the same could happen with Linux. But there it is a web of trust in force, official CRCs to check against. Nothing like that exists for closed source products, because the company itself is distributing it, noone else. Naturally, such trojaned versions be very bad for the parent company.

Unless, say, your FTP server gets rooted, you don't notice for MONTHS, and nobody ever notices.

I seriously doubt that having the code open does anything, in real and actual terms, to improve security or prevent trojans. If anything, all it serves to do is let you track things down after the fact. But I doubt that any appreciable number of OSS users give a serious audit to any code they download.

Re:Drivers

[phliar]

Not every company is willing to open source all their software and make it free.

So? This isn't about software, but hardware. Hardware manufacturers are in the business of selling hardware; device drivers are just something they write so customers can use the hardware. The only write Windows drivers simply because of plain ol' "market share". It's when they refuse to release programming information for the cards -- that's just stupid. They're admitting either that they don't want to to sell more product, or that they're incapable of designing hardware with reasonable interfaces that don't give away trade secrets. I know; I work for a hardware manufacturer.

(Insightful? Sheesh!)

Open source sucks ass!

[Oceanman]

Gay open source software is shit! Go take a shower, fucking NERDS!

Re:Open source sucks ass!

[justsomebody]

(Dam'n, I'll byte that one)

And you should probably brush your mouth after such comments:)

p.s. Few questions:
1. Is that Open Software/Gay a new software topic?
2. Never heard of software type like that? And could you describe it's functionality since it's probably reserved for gay people like you
3. Since Gay open source is shit, does that mean that Gay proprietary software is better?

p.p.s. Sorry for such a list of questions, but I'm not gay (obviously that topic is reserved for gays and you sound like a well informed person), so you should cover your topic and comments with more facts and explain to us non-gay public that might be interested in your points and views, even if no other reason than maybe try to contradict you.

Hell, I've got some karma to burn

Re:Open source sucks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

The dot com crash boom was really hard for you, wasn't it?

Listen. Nobody can help you if you are an asshole Oceanman.

morons WANdering about use of term interaction

[Anonymous Coward]

morons WANdering about use of term interaction

for the most part, that appears to mean that you sheeples read the pitch, & hopefully pull out
yOUR wallets. that's your end of the 'interaction'.

other possible uses for the miracles of communication we've been given:

disempowering the unprecedented evile that is destroying the planet/population.

how does won login/become a member?

consult with/trust in yOUR creator. get more oxygen on yOUR brains. seek others of non-aggressive
intentions/behaviours.

couldn't be easier. what's blocking all this interaction/cooperation? why greed/fear based
misinformation canpains of course.

you NEVER hear of any corepirate deathmongers touting oxygen, even though it's the best thing for
you/us. perhaps there's no countabull profit in it. another possibility is the overwhelming fear
associated with knowing that a power that exceeds all known before, is in the wings/air.

we're in crisis mode. the lights are coming up. pay attention (to the weather for example). it's
affordable, & tends to help prevent being misled further.

dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Do subscribers (*) get to see dupes in 1080i?

Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Pope Raymond Lama]

When one talks in support for Linux for any hardware, it is always important to note if sad software is Free Software or not.

If not for ideological motives, which seen so secondary to most /. readers, one should note that a proprietary driver is all but ilegal if functioning with a GPLed Kernel.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[SCO$699FeeTroll]

important to note if sad software is Free Software or not.

Yep, it is sad software, especially when you have to pay the $699 licensing fee. Good Day, teabagger.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Elm Tree]

According to their website they distribute with the card the sources for the V4L driver and the modified version of xine they talk about. Although they do talk about optionaly using NVidia cards to accelerate things, so they may encourage the use of NVidia's binary drivers. But either way, those are optional optimizations so...

Looks like a very nice card... If I had HDTV service I'd definately think about buying one.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[DarlFromSCO]

Hey ! That's my quote ! What are you, some fancy schmancy IBM developist or something ?

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe the nerve of this guy.

I you just insane or why are you posting on Slashdot?!

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If I had HDTV service I'd definately think about buying one."

Why not buy one to get the broadcast HDTV signals? I get FOX, NBC, CBS and NBC in 1080i from an antenna.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[pyite69]

Yes, they are 100% completely GPL, it looks like a
basic modification of the standard bttv driver.

You can download a copy of the whole CDROM from
their site and check for yourself.

Mark

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

bah, until there is mplayer supper so we can use it without a damned gui it's useless except for a "gee-wiz" toy.

mplayer being command line allows me to EASILY set up a crontab to record shows. this CANNOT be done with gui based apps as they need X running and I dont want X running, nor does anyone running a media server.

xine will continue to stink uintil they make it able for me to compile a CLI interface to it and remove all the useless GUI crud so I can use xine as a real tool.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[madcow_ucsb]

Not everyone lives somewhere where that's possible. I'm in San Mateo now, so my friend in the building can get like 10 HDTV channels off a set of rabbit ears. But I was in Santa Barbara before and could only get one channel in analog (vhf, got a few uhf) but not a single digital one could make it to the house. We tried an outside antenna too, but ended up returning it.

That said I'd still like to know why DTV doesn't broadcast the networks in high-def...

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[brandon]

Everything is OSS. (Drivers are a patched bttv (Currently but changing) kernel module. The mpeg2 decoding uses XvMC extensions on the NVIDIA cards. support for using xine to change channels on the card (Via v4l) and XvMC support was added.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[i_am_nitrogen]

The card comes with command line tools for recording HDTV streams as well, for those of us who love crontab. Rumor has it a basic Linux box with a fairly decent processor and 7200RPM hard drive is capable of running four of these cards at once, all recording to disk simultaneously.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Elm Tree]

But they said that it has V4L support, ergo mplayer supports it.
The beauty of a generalized video input interface... :)

kill -9

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no greater pleasure in life than being able to

kill -9 JerrySpringer

when those irritating twats show up every morning.

Re:kill -9

[jc42]

Heh. Very good. I'd have used a lot more words:

Now if they could only supply some good programmings ...

A couple of years back, my wife got herself a present of a nice big screen to go with the DVD player, so she can watch all the old movies that she likes.

Then, about a month ago, she got herself a new Powerook G4, the one with the "superdrive" that does CD and DVD. She hasn't turned on the TV since then. She just takes the powerbook into the bedroom lies down, pops in the DVD, and she's happy. She joined Netflix so she can "rent" lots of old movies on DVD cheap, and has already bought a couple of them.

Television is so 2002 ...

C-CUBE.

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me. Does anyone have Linux drivers for the C-CUBE chip on the Pinnacle line of video editing cards? C-CUBE is long gone, absorbed by LS-Logic I believe. And chip info has disappeared.

Re:C-CUBE.

[Anonymous Coward]

pinnacle never released any video editing cards.

the closest thing I have seen in a video editing card is the AVID daughter card that has a Pentium chip on it for doing Title rendering on the fly.

Otherwise nothing exists like you talk about.

NOBODY ever made a video editing card. they make capture cards, encoder cards, decoder cards, and daughter-processing cards. NEVER has there ever been a video editing card.

I'll bet you run Linux 9.0 too!

Don't forget...

[SCO$699FeeTroll]

...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers.

John Geoghan, pedophile priest, dead at 68

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - child analer John Geoghan was found dead in Souza-Baranowski Correction Center this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to Catholic Sex Scandals. Truly an American icon.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

How far behind Windows XP are you now?

cool

[wolrahnaes]

Now if we get support for the HDTV outputs on the Radeon 9800, I will have the perfect DVR to go with my 61" HDTV!

Site's already slow....
Probably won't survive the /.ing...

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

...but for timeshifting the shows...let's see you beat that, RIAA.

what makes you think the Recording Industry Association of America [ie, record label trade assocation] is gonna care whether or not you timeshift television shows?

Re:cool

[Stigmata669]

actually, your Radeon9800 will output to your HDTV card because HDTV can't be sent over the PCI bus... too little bandwidth. The MyHD card takes input from your graphics card and then overlays the HD signal output to your monitor

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

If HDTV can't be sent over a PCI bus then how do you explain this?

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

They were using a 64 bit PCI bus.

Re:cool

[renehollan]

Er, perhaps, but the real kicker was that they were recording mudulated MPEG2 transport streams, i.e. compressed content.

Re:cool

[Mike Hicks]

Uncompressed HDTV uses a lot of bandwidth. Compressed HDTV does not. Assuming 24 bits per pixel, a 1080i signal would require nearly 200MBytes per second (and even more if whatever device you're talking to only does 32bpp), which goes far beyond the standard 133MByte/s of a normal PCI bus. However, it's well within the domain of a 64-bit PCI66 slot or an AGP 1x slot (both of which operate at 533MByte/s, if memory serves).

A full-bandwidth ATSC stream can carry nearly 20 Mbit/s of data, which translates to around 2.5MByte/s.

The GNU Radio people weren't really doing either of those things -- they did a really raw capture of that ~20Mbit/s stream (though with error correction added in, an ATSC broadcast runs more like 25-30Mbit/s). With the sampling hardware they used, it added up to something around 40MByte/s of data being captured, according to their How to HDTV page.

Re:cool

[dirty]

The original poster was talking about the HDTV dongle that ATI provides I believe. It plugs into the video card and lets you do HDTV component out. Also, you can very easily send compressed HDTV over the PCI bus. This card and the FusionHDTV cards do exactly that. The MyHD card actually can send uncompressed HDTV over the PCI bus too I believe. It's just down scaled and not very good quality.

Re:cool

[i_am_nitrogen]

HDTV uses a 4:2:0 color sampling, which means that the luminance channel is 1920x1080, and the two chrominance channels are 960x540. So, it's not 24 bits per pixel. It's more like 16. You might be able to squeeze it over a PCI bus, but an AGP video card ought to be able to do it on a fast enough system (2.4Ghz P4 or XP2600+ probably).

Since NVidia's binary drivers have support for motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform, the processor has less work to do, and can offload work to the video card. Since the data can be sent over the AGP bus, it should be possible to get full speed HDTV decoding.

Re:cool

[Mike Hicks]

Ah, of course. I keep thinking RGB, RGB, RGB, but there are other ways of encoding image data...

I ordered one of these pcHDTV cards on Thursday, so hopefully it will arrive tomorrow. However, I'm still figuring out what sort of hardware I want to have surrounding the thing. The website says that a 2GHz P4 would be adequate for a system without an nVidia card, but I'd like to put some wiggle room on top of that.

Now hopefully I won't run into any money troubles while I assemble everything ;-)

Re:cool

[wolrahnaes]

actually, your Radeon9800 will output to your HDTV card

As others have mentioned, I was referring to the YPrPb (component) output that is output either from a dongle on the AiW 9800 or adapted from the DVI port on the AiW 9700. I have no idea how (or if) it comes out of the non AiW models.

HDTV can't be sent over the PCI bus

I havent yet seen a TV tuner of any kind for PCs that doesnt allow recording. The card mentioned not only allows recording, meaning there is enough bus left over to feed the data to the hard drive, but also allows it to be forwarded to a DVHS deck through your 1394 port.

MyHD card takes input from your graphics card and then overlays the HD signal output to your monitor

It does this when not recording or forwarding data, to prevent any performance hit on the system.

Cool

[kcb93x]

This is really interesting- I know I'll be buying one within a year or two, to go along with my wonderful new LCD screens and system. Linux-compatible from the ground up. Got RH 9 on it right now (Mandrake choked on it last time for some odd reason- never did figure that out)

Now...just to find a cheap big lcd screen... ...and mucho more HD space...no, not for pr0n, but for timeshifting the shows...let's see you beat that, RIAA. *Wonders if a lawsuit could ensue for people trying to timeshift, but not being able to...hmmmm....*

On a side note, out of 14 posts (when I first viewed page) only 1 was actually relevant. The sad status of /. *Sigh*.

novel idea - check the link

[dwk123]

Both drivers and extensive patches to Xine are open source and already available.

Outstanding!

[YetAnotherName]

I tell you, it's darn difficult watching things in standard definition once you've gotten used to Jennifer Gartner on Alias in her glorious 1920 by 1080 pixels with a full color gamut.

Timeshifting her is the hard part. For that, I've resorted to the MyHD card with its Windows drivers sitting on a system with an IDE-based RAID array. Yes, it works. But it's Windows. Need I say more to a Slashdot crowd? ;-)

Re:Outstanding!

[Anonymous Coward]

s/ to a Slashdot crowd//

Re:Outstanding!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Alias is only 1280x720p as are all HDTV shows on ABC.

Re:Outstanding!

[steve_bryan]

Since Alias is on ABC doesn't that make it 1280 x 720? Still plenty of Garner pixels but they are all honest progressively scanned pixels. What may surprise many is how good even 480i and 480p programming is compared to NTSC. The local FOX affiliate was showing episodes of Fastlane in upconverted 720p widescreen (presumably from 480p source) and the picture was amazing (not as good as real 720p or 1080i if you did a screen capture, but still remarkable).

If you enjoy any program on OTA (over the air) TV this sort of product will enhance it immensely. I don't know for sure that this board supports it (the site is properly slashdotted) but the other significant enhancement is 5.1 surround sound. Let's not forget the other advantage is that the programming involves no monthly bill and with the right software it can be recorded to your hard disk (about 9 gig per hour).

Re:Outstanding!

[CausticWindow]

Compared to NTSC, even PAL is luxurious.

Re:Outstanding!

[G-funk]

True, you can always tell the import ads from the US, since they always look like ass :)

Re:Outstanding!

[Mike Hicks]

I have one word for you: Mentos

Re:Outstanding!

[leviramsey]

And I can always tell when I'm watching, for example, a show from Europe... it's just something with the color balance or something.

Re:Outstanding!

[satanami69]

That's because PAL doesn't let the end user change the color. Since you are watching it in NTSC, you get to change the color, and that's why it's messed up.

Re:Outstanding!

[satanami69]

It is broadcast in 720P, but not many HDTV can actually handle that. Instead, their Set-TopBox will upconvert it to 1080i.

Re:Outstanding!

[leviramsey]

That's probably it... Never The Same Color and all that...

Re:Outstanding!

[supernova87a]

actually, it's the voices -- everytime I watch a tv show overseas, like Germany, Australia, the voices are a little bit higher pitched than here for some reason! Listen to the Simpsons especially when you're in another country, and you can tell for yourself.

Re:Outstanding!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard that some 24 frame per second content is actually played at 25 fps on many PAL systems, which could account for the increase in pitch you're talking about. Also leaves more time for commercials, eh? ;-)

CmdrTaco???

[Anonymous Coward]

What POSSIBLE interest could YOU have in a Linux topic? Go back to your fancy, schmancy, OS X Powerbook and long for Steve Jobs's engorged dick in your mouth.

And let the REAL Linux cognoscenti go on about their business.

Fucking sell-out.

Great news

[tzanger]

But does anyone know what the status of v4l is in the 2.6 series? I went from 2.4.21 to 2.6.0-test3 (and now test4) as the HPT370 controller is iffy on Linux with APIC (this is an Epox EP-D3VA)... 2.6.0 completely solved all the APIC and SMP issues, but now V4L's not quite there. :-)

Ahh, the bleeding edge...

Re:Great news

[pantherace]

Look around for v4l2 (why it isn't in 2.6 (which I thought was planned is beyond me)) most cards seem to have both v4l and v4l2 (via patches) support.

Re:Great news

[i_am_nitrogen]

V4L2 is in 2.6, you just have to hunt around for it. I can't remember where it's categorized.

Re:Great news

[sc00p18]

I got my TV card working in 2.6 (test3) after applying the patches here: http://bytesex.org/patches/

Good riddance.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Catholic, I'm glad to see this fucker get his. In fact, he went too easily. Somebody should've beaten the fucker to death, just like Jeffrey Dahmer. No difference at all between the two, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, not quite the first....

[edwardd]

This is the first card specifically for HDTV, but:

For a while now, DVB cards have been available with software for Linux that have been able to recieve and process HDTV satalite signals. The 'other' PVR app that doesn't seem to catch on in the US is VDR, located at http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr This is a full featured, open source PVR application that does work with DVB cards to show HDTV.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[mprinkey]

There are only a handfull of HDTV channels on direct-broadcast satellite feeds. DirecTV has HDNET, Discovery, ESPN, HBO and SHO in HD. The Dish lineup is similar. There is just not that much Satellite HD content available.

The DVB system that you pointed to is a nice setup, but there are no PC add-in cards that I know of that allow access to DirecTV or Dish digital feeds whether SD or HD. The one exception might be via DirecTivos which can be hacked to allow extraction of the video feeds, but this is as a postprocessing task, not realtime. Perhaps there are add-in cards for Big-Ugly Dishes to decode HD broadcasts, but I am not aware of them.

I believe that Sony is planning to produce an HD DirecTivo receiver shortly for timeshifting HD content. I don't know if they will do a better job of hack-proofing that unit than with other Tivo units, so offline HD extraction is still an open question.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[Anonymous Coward]

There are only a handfull of HDTV channels on direct-broadcast satellite feeds. DirecTV has HDNET, Discovery, ESPN, HBO and SHO in HD. The Dish lineup is similar. There is just not that much Satellite HD content available.

Which is largely due to the networks not providing the HD content. But the momentum is definitely shifting. My company (a very very large cable network company with dozens of channels) has been dragging its feet on HD until now. We are launching our first HD channel next year.

It's coming, hang in there. The FCC forcing the [standard def] DTV issue has a lot to do with it.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[mprinkey]

It has been "coming" for several years now. Really, it is pretty pathetic. I outted the bucks for an HD projector, the Sony HD DirecTV receiver, and an amplified UHF antenna rig. With a lot of work, I was able to get ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS, and NBC to tune in from the broadcast towers in Pittsburgh.

After all of that work, the *only* channel that has decent HD content is PBS...and there are only a few shows that run all of the time. FOX is completely pathetic. The real networks run only a few shows a week. Even so, the prospect of being able to timeshift those few shows is pretty compelling, so I might need to build a MythHDTV box...Tivo has pretty much ruined me.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[Namarrgon]

Here down under, we've been watching HDTV via DVB-T (terrestrial) card for a couple of months - there are a few cards available, even with good Linux support.

Since the cards are basically just a tuner with a PCI bridge, all they do is receive the digital signal and dump it to your machine. The rest is software, and if you have the codecs (and the grunt), you can watch/record/timeshift an HDTV signal just as easily as SDTV.

I use mine under Windows (yeah, sorry), but I have a friend who's building a multi-tuner networked MythTV box, and is reporting great sucecss under Linux.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[jpc]

I didnt know anyone was broadcasting hdtv on DVB. What resolutions are being broadcast? Will any old DVB card work with hd (as it is just a larger mpeg stream - presumably you just get fewer channels in the slot).

I certainly have not come across any hd dvb in Europe. Would have thought the bbc might have trialled it.

I'll cut you nigga

[Anonymous Coward]

Lunix this, Lunix that. Just buy XP and shut the fuck up.

Goddamn commies.

A/S/L??????

[Anonymous Coward]

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90 day warranty?

[Torp]

http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000007

Isn't that a bit low for the average piece of hardware in a PC? I bought an ancient (used) ISA sound card for an even more ancient PC and I still got 180 days of warranty for it...

Reasons to make offical Linux drivers

[Felinoid]

1. Users will continually update drivers and eventually absorb them into vareous Linux projects taking support off your hands permenently.
2. Free advertsing on Freshmeat as your drivers are announced then again as projects absorb your drivers.
3. Free adveritsing on Slashdot.
4. Slimmer marketshare means greater sales amoung Linux users.

Reasons to NOT provide offical Linux drivers
1. If your suffering on the Windows side a quick throw in to support Linux will not save you.

2. It'll piss off Microsoft.

3. Your website will be slashdotted.

4. There is a lose lose factor on your drivers. If your drivers are too good users may not improve them if they suck to much users won't buy your product.

Your best bet is to always supply unoffical drivers directly into open source projects so that users will always look to the open source projects for support and not you while at the same time the open source projects give you free advertsing and they get slashdotted not you.

Re:Reasons to make offical Linux drivers

[Nucleon500]

Of course, the most important thing is completely open standards, without which any third party drivers are bound to suck, if they work at all. And why not, anyway? I've heard two reasons.

First, for "Win-" hardware, like controllerless modems and printers, companies are afraid if their driver was open-source, it would be simple for their competitors to use, reducing their software development costs. Two solutions: one, the company could GPL it, so at least they'd get any improvements. Or (more likely), someone should make a GPL driver core, which could be attached to similar dumb hardware, even of different brands. Then, with open specs, it would be easy to bind the hardware to the core to the kernel, and the company may even find it cheaper to adapt the open version for all OSs. (Aside: would Microsoft sign drivers with GPL cores?)

The other problem is that companies fear open-source drivers won't honor the evil bit, for example, WiFi cards with hacked drivers operating on forbidden frequencies, or video cards not honoring MacroVision signals. For starters, it's almost as easy to hack binary drivers, so it's no protection. Another solution is to make the hardware only accept register sets signed by the manufacturer's private key. This was proposed for WiFi cards, is better protection anyway, and can be used by open-source projects.

Not the first

[mocm]

There have been digital TV cards with open source Linux support for years. This may be the first card for the ATSC standard and doesn't even have an MPEG decoder, or why would the need xine.
Do they support the Linux DVB API, or at least the parts that are common in ATSC and DVB?
Are the drivers open source?

For more information on linux and digital TV see
LinuxTV
Metzlerbros
and links on those sites.

Re:Not the first

[mocm]

Just had a look at the drivers. They just modified the bttv drivers a little and added a tuner driver with big chunks of firmware. No frontend device no demux device, just a TS dump.
They should have taken a look at the DVB API and its history, which also started with a slightly modified v4l API, but has matured quite a lot over the past few years.
They could have used the software demuxer which is already in the 2.6er test kernels.

Timeshifting

[NaveWeiss]

I've read a lot here about the possible recording limitations. Does this (slashdotted) company mean no more timeshifting problems?

Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[k-s]

Hello,

I'm a core Freevo developer and I have something to say:

Hardware makers: PLEASE SEND YOUR PRODUCTS TO PROJECTS DEVELOPERS! We don't have money/machine to buy every HW on the earth, so if you want to be supported, please provide at least one board to the project!

Recently we won an Epia and Hauppage PVR-250 and they will be better supported than others, just because we can test it.

If you like the idea and want to be supported, contact us via developers list (freevo: freevo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net)

Thanks, Gustavo

Re:Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[FryGuy1013]

Not to be mean or anything, but I don't think saying you "won" an Epia and Hauppage from the companies is going to make them send you any more "prizes."

I'm fairly certain that the MythTV developers have a PVR or three, but I do know that they have pretty good PVR-250/350 support from reading their mailing list. Donating hardware to open-source driver and/or software makers is definately a good investment.

If any hardware makers see this and are in the giving mood and have more than one to donate to the freevo guys, I'm sure the mythtv guys would be more than happy to have one too. Their website is http://mythtv.org/, and http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev/ to sign up for the developer mailing list.

Re:Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[k-s]

We won not directly, but because one of the developers won a contest.

Also, we like MythTV too! They're open source and in the TV area they're (still :p) better.

Also, I mean to donate to projects in general. MPlayer and TVtime guys would like to get one too.

Gustavo

Re:Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[brandon]

I did the support for MythTV for this card. I had to buy the card, and I also know the person who owns pcHDTV. Getting the card to work is fairly easy. The card uses a patched bttv driver (currently but this will be changing) and only requires a different ioctly set for the video mode. You then just stream mpeg2-ts from /dev/dtv. The main problem is if your video player (ie mplayer in freevo's case) correctly supports mpeg2-ts, which it doesn't do fully changing sub channels. This is a mplayer, not freevo issue though. And support can be done without the card even. :) Come talk to me, bbeattie on the freenode network if you have any questions though.

Drivers-Onion peels.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed with both posts. The closer to the hardware, the more necessary openness is. But then what is freedom worth, when you can't use your shiny new toy?

Re:Drivers-Onion peels.

[justsomebody]

I think Janis Joplin described that:)
"Freedom is when you've got nothing to loose"

But "closer to hardware > more necessary the openess" isn't really correct. Sometimes hardware might be needing to include tools.

Let's take a peak at Avid or Digi & Pro Tools.
Stripping software out of the box might not be favourable position for them. They would get them in a position where one product would be usable and one would be a bad review for the other.

Here is where "closer to hardware > more necessary the openess" starts getting wrong.

What is important is where to draw a line between open and closed. Mainly writting drivers is way shorter than writing specs, because drivers are not some huge peace of code and on the other side specs could be. But making complete application OSS would be bad, if that company sells hardware just because what software offers and hardware alone isn't worth shit just because you can get comparable hardware for more affordable price and use OSS app for hardware you haven't bought.

Re:Drivers-Onion peels.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, dear lord. Would it be too much trouble to at least get the quote right? It's "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and Janis Joplin didn't write it. She just covered the song. The song--"Me and Bobby McGee"-- was written by Kris Kristofferson.

Re:Drivers-Onion peels.

[justsomebody]

Thanks.

web site javascript errors

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they'd fix their site to not throw javascript errors on every menu or flyover, I could have a look. You'd think they would at least test with IE6.

Re:web site javascript errors

[Mike Hicks]

Heh, well, when the card only has drivers for Linux (so far, at least), I think they can get away with that.

Re:web site javascript errors

[i_am_nitrogen]

It works great in Konqueror. Must be a bug in Internet Explorer. Lots of sites give me Javascript errors when I'm using IE ("Invalid character"). Since the card doesn't even have Windows drivers, why support the Windows browser?

From the FAQ page:

[justinstreufert]

Is there a windows version of the drivers?
Not at this time.

GOD, that's nice to see for once!!
Justin

Digital Cable Card

[TornSheetMetal]

Do any cards exist that can decode digital cable tv without having to go through the digital cable tv box? I'm not looking to get channels I'm not paying for. I just want a PVR that can act like my VCR did when I had analog cable. I used to be able to easily record shows on different channels. Tivo solves the problem by changing the channel on the Digital Cable TV box which isn't the optimal solution and prevents me from watching one show and recording another.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[pyite69]

Why not get a DirecTivo and DirecTV?

Mark

Re:Digital Cable Card

[adpowers]

Because he wants Digital Cable, not DirecTV.

I looked around the DirecTV website and din't find a digital video recorder that supports HDTV.

If you did get a Tivo one, you are limited by what they let you do. They can remove 30 second skip at well or make you watch advertisements. Stuff like MythTV has lots of features with no advertisements and it doesn't track what you record (and send it to some master database at HQ). Plus, MythTV-like programs allow you to do a bunch of other stuff like play ROMs, DVDs, look at your pictures of the network, listen to mp3s, check your weather, etc.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[Anonymous Coward]

HDTV signals use different encoding over the air (8VSB) and on cable (QAM). Right now no one is making HDTV tuner cards for PCs that understand QAM, but there are many that understand 8VSB (including the one that this article is about).

One big problem is that encryption is not standardized across cable companies, and unlike DirecTV, there is no card which contains your decryption keys. This makes it difficult to build a solution that works in a PC and gets you any extended channels. My understanding is that there is work going on to standardize cable boxes, but I don't know the status of that.

alex

Re:Digital Cable Card

[PatJensen]

Here's a solution for you.

Don't use the IR blaster on your TiVo. Upgrade to a Series 2 standalone with OS 4.0 and use a serial cable to connect your digital cable box. This gets rid of the slow channel change delays and pop-ups that come up when you change channels.

Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2 to use serial channel change support. There is a port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will just be sending IR without a blaster.

If you are on Comcast/AT&T, quite a few of the Motorola boxes support serial with the latest firmware. Check out the TiVo forum on AVS (www.avsforum.com) for more information.

Pat

Re:Digital Cable Card

[diatonic]

If you want to watch one show and record another, use the analog cable signal that should co-exist on the coax with the digital signal. Run your digital cable box to a S-Video or Composite in on your TV-tuner card, and use a serial cable to change channels on the external tuner. Then you should be able to use the tuner to watch the 70-80 channels offered on the analog cable signal. Or you could always go for 2 digital cable recievers. .:diatonic:.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[konfoo]

No, because digital cable is a pay service and not free-to-air. Content and movie providers will not allow it, and any provider who would attempt to roll out such a device will instantly have their content culled. In the future, when content protection systems (no I won't use the DRM word) can guarantee rights all the way down to storage on the PVR device, then you may see a PC-based option. Until then, unfortunately, forget it.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[jcdick1]

Unfortunately, no, you can't get a PVR that can decode digital cable signals.

Each cable company codes their boxes with a unique identifier and encryption that prevents the end user from being able to do anything with the digital spectrum of channels without the cable company knowing it, because you need the box.

And even if some company were to come up with a card that was compatible with, say, a Motorola DCTxxxx, your cable company would most likely refuse to provide you with the necessary information to program your card, nor would they send a technician out to do it.

The digital cable is designed to require the box. And there is nothing that you, as a subscriber, can do about it, unfortunately.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[Anonymous Coward]

> Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2
> to use serial channel change support. There is a
> port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will
> just be sending IR without a blaster.

Untrue. If you search the tivo lists, you'll see a link to what's now known as "Embeem's patch" for enabling the code on Series 1 Tivos for seeing Serial Channel Changing in the menus. I've been changing channels via serial cable for at least 3 months now on my Series 1 Tivo.

Look here for the code

I know about the internal IR blaster. This is not it.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[silas_moeckel]

Just a clarification when using a direct Tivo no phone connection is needed the Tivo gets all it's info from the bird. The only thing the phone line needs to be connected for is to charge back for pay per view. Granted it will bitch every now and then but no features are lost.

As an asside MythTV is a good looking application that needs a hardware platform to run on a PC in your living room is general not acceptable nor are long runs of cable to remote the PC (I counted a minimum of 4 cables to get it right one for video, one for digital audio one for USB or firewire for a DVD-R remoted in the room and possibly a serial cable) Tivo is a decent platform only needing to be put inside something for sound proofing to get rid of the anoying HD and fan hum. A silent PC with no hard drive and recording to NAS somewhere else might be a decent solution.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[Rufosx]

I don't think you can really do any third party decoders for digital cable yet. You're pretty much stuck with what the cable company gives/rents you. However, many of the major cable companies and TV manufacturers have petitioned the FCC to create a standard for digital cable that can be integrated into anything, including your TVs. Once this standard is pretty stable, expect to see computer cards that support it.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[PatJensen]

Awesome. That rocks! I was just referring to out of the box functionality, without modding/patching Linux to get that cable to work. I'll have to look into that patch, because I have a lot of friends on Comcast with digital cable boxes and Series 1 TiVo's.

-Pat

Re:Digital Cable Card

[tgd]

I've been doing direct serial control of the Motorola boxes with my series 1 for years...

The internet is your friend, the instructions on how to set it up are out there... its a ten line TCL script you have to run once to set things up for it.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[tgd]

Its not modding or patching Linux, its just setting a couple keys in their MFS database to get it to work.

Alternately, if you want to fix your IR blaster, all you nneed to do is open the tivo, look behind the black "eye" on the front -- there is an IR transmitter and IR receiver there. Cover the transmitter with electrical tape. Channel change problems will be gone.

MOD DUMB-ASS PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

1. used 'loose' instead of 'lose'

2. quoted a dirty hippy

3. misquoted a dirty hippy

My review of the card

[pyite69]

I have one of these and it is basically as
advertised. I use it to capture streams on Linux,
though I still play them back on my Windows-based
card which has component video support.

However, the xine patches work OK.

It is still a hacker's delight, though, and will
continue to be until all of the modifications
make it into the xine and v4l trees; and into at
least the Debian Unstable package system. The
software works, but takes some effort to get
installed and running.

I am quite satisfied with my purchase!!! Everyone
who supports Linux should buy one, if only to
support the business model.

Mark

A message from the irritated

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to take an off-topic minute to thank Redmond for really pissing me off.
The concept that people enjoy freedom has escaped you, particularly where upgrades or re-installations are concerned.
Previous versions of Lose^H^H^H^HWindows didn't screw up the partition table the way XP does.
As a result of this crap, I just wiped a drive, and now get to spend a bunch of time putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
If I trusted Redmond enough to think this a simple technical issue, a lack of testing, that would be one thing.
Rather, I'd bet Ballmer's bum it's a deliberate move to make it harder for people to use their hardware as they see fit, a la "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run."
Deal is, you do nothing but harden the resolve in the market to use alternative products.
And another thing: it's not like I'm not a paying customer; I pay you that MSDN subscription tax. Accusations of "socialist", "hippy", and "thief" do not apply. I simply enjoy freedom, and despise your efforts to jail the world.
So, even if this is a little over the top, and you're not as diabolical as I suspect, MicroSoft, more effort into making sure your stuff plays nice would be an excellent PR move.

RIAA TV

[yerricde]

Some people timeshift MTV.

Re:RIAA TV

[AKnightCowboy]

Some people timeshift MTV.

So? What's MTV got to do with music? Why would the RIAA care if you timeshifted Jackass or Beavis and Butthead reruns (if they even show it anymore).

Cool, but...

[Glendale2x]

This is pretty neat, but it appears to fall short of being able to just capture the ATSC stream and play it back unmodified to the TV.

Not everyone needs mad power hardware or cards to decode the MPEG2 stream and output it. Some HD tuners, like those included in the Mitsubishi HD sets, have FireWire jacks that are capable of feeding the transport stream to something (typically a D-VHS deck) and accepting a transport stream back from a device.

Apple has released a sample application with their FireWire SDK for MacOS X called VirtualDVHS that I've been playing with. My notes on it are here. The FireWire enabled tuner does all the work, including sending start/stop commands to the device, and on Mits sets, timer recordings.

It's a great little program, and since it's a SDK, you get all the source code for it and the FireWire drivers. The TV's remote control works (commands sent via the FireWire interface) and here's the best part: it works on a dead slow stock CPU G3 266. This computer can't even play simple QuickTime movies properly, yet it works like a charm because all it does is capture and stream back the MPEG2 transport stream. The tuner's decoder does all the hard work.

Okay, so it isn't a PVR with nifty features and whatnot, nor will it work if you don't have a tuner with FireWire jacks. But I don't care too much about the PVR features for the moment because there isn't enough OTA HD programming yet. All I need it to do is time shift a few programs each week when I'll have to be at work, or busy with school, or whatnot.

VirtualDVHS may be a ghetto program, but it gives you a glimpse of what you can do with MPEG2 streams. No special ATSC cards required. And hey, you get the source: make it do more of what you want and tell people about it, or write your own.

Re:Cool, but...

[konfoo]

Yeah but it requires you buy a HDTV tuner with Firewire output. So you are essentially purchasing the same thing as a ATSC tuner board and plugging it into a PC with firewire output. You can do all you describe on a PC with windows already. So that's nothing new. What is new is the broadcast protection flag and how it will be finally implemented. I personally wouldn't spend a whole lot of cash on hardware HD tuners with digital interfaces - one might find them not to be 'HDTV Ready' when the specs are finally ratified and implemented.

Re:Cool, but...

[Glendale2x]

Yeah but it requires you buy a HDTV tuner with Firewire output. So you are essentially purchasing the same thing as a ATSC tuner board and plugging it into a PC with firewire output. You can do all you describe on a PC with windows already. So that's nothing new. What is new is the broadcast protection flag and how it will be finally implemented. I personally wouldn't spend a whole lot of cash on hardware HD tuners with digital interfaces - one might find them not to be 'HDTV Ready' when the specs are finally ratified and implemented.

Well, I have a Mits 511 series, and it came with FireWire jacks. Cost to add recording capabilities to the TV: free. And that was basically my goal.

In my playing with the Mits set and transport streams, I did stumble across the broadcast protection flag. Basically, it just flashed a message up on screen saying "recording prohibited" or something of that nature.

The goal of the broadcast protection flag is to prevent any recording, and it's been there since the beginning. All someone has to do is switch it on with their broadcasts and nobody can record it. They just haven't done that yet.

You don't have to buy anything if you get a set (or tuner) with FireWire. Any Mitsubishi HD integrated (including promise module upgraded) set or the Samsung 165 STB will do, since they have built-in controllers. The WalMart special HDTV probably won't cut it.

Like I said, this isn't for everyone. But with I got the Mits 511 I knew it had FireWire and what it was capable of doing, but I haven't tried to exploit it until recently. But if you have FireWire access to your tuner, and a computer laying around, you get a free HD recorder.

Great!

[konfoo]

Now I can *finally* add support for my ATSC datacasting product to Linux. If you're in San Diego (KPBS), Washington DC (WETA), Kentucky (KET), or Michigan (Station name escapes me), you should be able to pick up this emergency information / weather imaging data feed.

GPL invalid

[DarlFromSCO]

Yes, they are 100% completely GPL

But I thought the General Piracy License thingy was illegal ?!

Nice but...

[slykens]

Too bad the FCC's balls are in the broadcasters' purse.

Simply put, many people can't receieve a HD signal period. Where I live only one station is transmitting HD and they are 65 miles away, so no over-the-air (UHF).

Until the FCC requires full power DTV transmission along with must-carry on cable systems and a requirement to pass the highest definition signal available from a network the masses just don't have enough access to HD, period.

pcHDTV card

[brandon]

Pre-orders have begun for the pcHDTV HD-2000 card and the cards will start to ship this week. Several lucky people who have contacted me (or pcHDTV) already have the card and have been enjoying HDTV on Linux. My part is HDTV/Linux that I have been working on support for the card in MythTV for the last month, but due to my very busy schedule all features are not complete (seeking and handling low HDTV signals). I invite anyone who is interested in HDTV and MythTV to come by #mythtv on the freenode irc network and talk with me (bbeattie). The largest problem right now is obtaining a HDTV program schedule as xmltv does not provide this.

Also, I have written a Linux HTPC how-to that talks about the card and other Linux HTPC like issues at www.sllug.org/how-to/linux-htpc/introduction.html . It will be very useful for anyone wanting to do HDTV or HTPC like features with Linux.

Re:pcHDTV card

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that info. I just recently discovered MythTV and it looks great -- keep going! I'm in the process of trying to figure out exactly what hardware to buy to get into homebrew PVR on a Linux box. I have Digital Cable with RCN with a Motorola cable box with serial as well as IR connectors. My questions:

o First about the HDTV card since that's what this post is about: Is the HDTV card just for signals through the air, or can you use it with a cable connection? Is the signal coming out of a cable box still digital, or has been converted to analog?

o I was actually thinking of getting a Hauppage PVR 350 card, since I see that it has an IR transmitter. Do you have any info on when support for this would be available, roughly? The IR transmitter is the component that allows to change the channel on the cable box, right? Would it would with the serial connection on the cable box, or the IR connection?

This could be a convergance killer-app

[Mithrandur]

HDTV tuners are expensive. A quick look at Buy.com finds them listing for $400-$800. This card is only $190, and since it's integrated with a PC, turning it into a PVR is just a matter of software. Perhaps HDTV tuners will be the killer app that puts PCs in the entertainment center.

Re:This could be a convergance killer-app

[pe1chl]

I'm not so sure.
I recently bought both a new video card for my Linux PC with TV-OUT, and a Dreambox DM-7000S DVB-S receiver (which runs Linux as its OS).
The Dreambox is a perfectly usable product, giving top-quality picture to the TV set it is directly connected to using RGB (can also do YPrPb).
The PC can only output CVBS or S-Video (anyone seen a PC Video card that outputs component video?), and even then the driver manufacturer decided that I should not use the whole screen area. If I would want, I would need to enable some "overscan" option and it does not work in the Linux driver.
(I would define what they currently output as "underscan", there is a 2cm black border all around)

Even then, when I want to play a MPG or DIVX from Mplayer, it seems there is a nasty interference between the emulated framerate on the card (which is 60Hz and cannot be changed) and the 50Hz framerate output to the TV. It mainly shows on quickly moving picture content. Unusable for all day TV viewing.

Finally, running cables between the PC and TV is quite impractical. I have a 6M stretch of SCART cable (several coaxial and plain leads in a 1cm shroud) running now. In many houses an even longer cable may be required.
The Dreambox neatly interfaces to the PC using UTP Ethernet. A clever interface choice because the cable can be any length required in a home (competing products often use USB which has too strict length requirements).

The price is about $400 but I prefer it any time over the cheap solution. You get PC integration without the dependancy and the hassle.

Re:This could be a convergance killer-app

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC can only output CVBS or S-Video (anyone seen a PC Video card that outputs component video?)

Sure, but it's usually called a VGA connector :) You can supposedly get it to work by just connect the RGB wires to RGB and both sync wires on the VGA side to composite sync in a SCART, but this is not recommended, as there should be a small circuit to merge these signals. I have not made this circuit myself but it did not look to hard when I saw it on the net (don't remember the link, sorry, you can probably find it by searching for vga rgb tv converter or something similar...)
The other problem is of course that your TV might not like the sync the VGA card is sending as standard, and it can quite possibly destroy your TV if you get it wrong (think old VGA monitors set to way to high resolution.)
If I remember correctly there is a TV safe VGA card called ArcadeVGA based on a radeon chipset that can be used to avoid these problems. There are probably people on arcadecontrols or similar sites that can help (arcade monitors and TVs are very similar,) since there are many people who have done this for arcade gaming machines based on PCs, while I, again, have not :)
I found one page while writing this that might be helpful.

Re:This could be a convergance killer-app

[pe1chl]

Of course that is true, but not really a solution for the card I have now. It has a single VGA and a single TV-OUT. For this solution a card with two VGA outputs is required. I could not find one that also has TV-IN (they exist but not in the shops nearby).

With Linux it should be possible to generate the correct (or at least close enough) sync signals while in Xfree.

The external circuit will be required, yes. Also to generate the SCART switching voltages to enable RGB.

And then, it may be a short lived solution as I have found that many video products are switching from RGB to YPrPb, for a reason I still have to find out (maybe only to make existing RGB equipment unusable with new stuff?)

YESSSSS!

[flacco]

I'm going to buy one for this FAQ entry alone:

Is there a windows version of the drivers?
Not at this time.

check mplayer CVS

[Ayanami Rei]

xine and mplayer have more than once traded code. I expect some crazy fool will take those patches and cram it into mplayer CVS at some point in the next month.

Re:check mplayer CVS

[0x0d0a]

Unfortunately, with Arpi gone, I'm not sure what's going to happen to mplayer development.

Re:check mplayer CVS

[evilviper]

Arpi isn't really gone, and MPlayer development is going along quite well.

No QAM support

[Cordath]

Doh. Several European cards have the QAM love going. Why can't a North American card? Heck. I'd buy a card that supported QAM if I had to buy a Mac with it!

Firewire TS transfer in Linux

[i_am_nitrogen]

There's a thread on AVS Forum about using DVHS VCR's in Linux. It doesn't support D-Theater, so prerecorded shows won't work, but you can use the tools for transferring to/from a DVHS deck, Firewire-enabled tuner, or other MPEG2 TS over 1394 device.

TL880-based Card Driver

[i_am_nitrogen]

Hello, I'm the developer of that TL880 driver linked to in the story. It would be really nice if everyone who owns such a card (MyHD, HiPix, WinTV-HD, AccessDTV) came on over and subscribed to the mailing list, and played with some of the software for a few minutes. The latest effort is to map the card's registers. A preliminary map that has nearly every register listed, but only detailed descriptions for enough registers to get the card displaying color bars, is located here. Also, as -tji mentioned in another post, ATI's set top box division is unwilling to provide any help to anyone not buying a minimum $25000 annual volume. So, if everyone who owns such a card could e-mail their card's manufacturer (i.e. Hauppauge, Telemann, MIT), as suggested on the How To Help page, asking them to try to arrange for help with the I2C-connected chips on the card, it would be great.

Thanks.

As for the PCHDTV, I just ordered an upgrade for my sytem from an Athlon XP1800+ to 2600+ with 333MHz FSB, and a Geforce FX 5200 for motion compensation, and I'll probably be ordering the PCHDTV soon. The useful parts of the code for the TL880 driver are the Oren VSB demodulator interface and the modified tuner.c which includes support for the dual input Philips NTSC/ATSC tuner. It's really annoying that the tuner and msp3400 modules in the kernel only attach to bttv drivers, rather than providing a generic interface that any new driver can hook to.

Re:TL880-based Card Driver

[mocm]

You should have a look at the Linux DVB API and try to integrate your driver in this scheme. There are many DVB cards using the same chips for PCI bridges as the ATSC cards do, so the only new thing is to write the tuner drivers. E.g. there already was a driver for DVB cards using the bt878 chipset, so that there was no need to reinvent the patches for the bttv driver. (Maybe they already new about that, because the pchdtv patches to the bttv drivers look eerily similar to the early ones for pctv cards without mentioning the original author)

Not the first, but welcome anyway

[Daniel Franklin]

This maybe the first ATSC HD receiver card on the market, but that doesn't make it the first HD :)

Australia uses the European DVB-T digital standard, and there are *many* so-called 'budget' DVB-T cards on the market which don't have a hardware MPEG decoder - they cost around $A200 (say around $US120) They let you dump the whole DVB transport stream into (say) mplayer, letting you watch HD, SD, or listen to audio-only channels, provided that the host machine is fast enough to handle it. You can also stream it to a faster machine across the network, in which case even a crappy slow box is an adequate TV receiver. Ironically the deluxe cards with on-board MPEG can only do standard definition digital :)

In Australia we have a variety of HD content available now, at a variety of resolutions including 1080i.

For many reasons, DVB-T is a much better system (COFDM as opposed to dodgy 8-VSB with horrendously complex equalisers).

DVB-T receivers in Australia/UK

[jquirke]

There have been DVB-T PC receivers for a while now, and recently cards have been shipping with HDTV support. I recently reviewed one of the first to hit Australia (since that is one of the VERY few countries outside the US that broadcasts digital HDTV).

Re:DVB-T receivers in Australia/UK

[jquirke]

Sorry, forgot to include the URL:

http://www.overclockers.com.au/article.php?id=18 91 19

ObSovietRussia:

[The Monster]

Jennifer Gartner on Alias . . . glorious . . . But it's Windows

In Soviet Russia, Windows makes Gartner look good!
BTW, She does not have a T in her name. (Garner)

CSI

[Andy Dodd]

Given that the CSI DVD releases are 4:3 (and a shitty low-bitrate MPEG encoding job to boot), the ONLY way to watch CSI is in its full HD glory.

Yes, CSI is originally filmed in widescreen, and the HDTV film transfer broadcast by CBS (Well, at least on WCBS-DT out of New York City) is absolutely amazing. The DVDs can't even come close to touching it.

So yes, there is some good HD programming on TV. My MyHD card was worth it just for the drool factor of CSI in HD alone...

This isn't a MyHD card

[Andy Dodd]

Since MPEG video uses a YUV colorspace which usually contains only one "color" pixel for every four or so "real" pixels. (Luminance is a 1:1 mapping, chrominance is usually 4:1 or so), the bandwidth needed for a 1920x1080i signal is reduced.

It is further reduced with many video cards that perform the IDCT and motion compensation in the video card and not on the host CPU.

That said, with an AGP vid card, even without hardware MoComp and IDCT, a P4-2.5 can (just barely) decode 1080i in realtime. With a card that does hardware IDCT and MoComp (NVidia is basically the only choice for this under Linux, due to deficiencies in ATI's drivers.), the CPU required is even less.

In short: This particular HD solution displays directly to your video card. No passthrough or other hardware tricks needed.

support for european users

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

I don't know enough about this, but this looks like a great place to ask :-)

Will this support PAL (or whatever standard used at europe.. ) ?

Thanks.

Re:support for european users

[pe1chl]

What do you have in mind?
HDTV will not be transmitted in PAL (Analogue) but only in digital (DVB) standard.

Re:support for european users

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

Hi, Thanks for replying.
I am not that informed about DVB - are there any cards which receive DVB? is it in use at all?

Re:support for european users

[pe1chl]

This thread is about a card.
There are other cards as well.
DVB is in wide use in Europe, mainly on satellite (DVB-S) but also on cable (DVB-C) and terrestrial (DVB-T).
I am not aware of any HDTV transmission in Europe, but it may well be that tests are going on.