HDTV Onto a PC Through FireWire?

William George asks: "As of April 1st, 2004 it has been required that all cable companies in the United States be able to provide customers, upon request, with a High Definition set-top box with IEEE 1394 (FireWire) connectivity (e-CFR Part 76.640 Section 4 Subsection i). This was designed to allow easier connections between modern TVs, set-top boxes, and digital PVRs. However, it should also allow for a connection to a computer... at least in theory. Well, I am out to test that theory. After extended communication with my local cable company (CableONE) they have arranged to send out a pair of techs to help me try this out. The arrangement is for them to come out on September 22, and with phone support from their corporate offices and Motorola (the company that provides their set-top boxes) we are going to see if it will work." "I have a Windows XP-based PC, and I recently added a 3-port FireWire card specifically to test this out. There is only one problem: software. Macs apparently have software built in for this, but I am having trouble finding a solution for Windows (Linux would be worth trying too, but I have not had any experience with it before). Does anyone out there know of any software for Windows that allows viewing and/or recording of an MPEG-2 transport stream over a FireWire connection? I found one website with a trial version of some software available for download, and I think it might have even been mentioned in a previous Slashdot post. However, their software crashed during installation even though my hardware meets their stated requirements and my FireWire card is based on a TI (Texas Instruments) chipset as they specify. Contact to their tech support resulted in instructions to try again, which I did with no luck. From reading their software description, however, it looks like it is only designed to store the video recording on a computer and then display it back to a TV - which is not what I need anyway. I want to get rid of the TV completely and allow for viewing and recording of pure, digital HDTV directly on a PC. Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated, and if this works I will set up a website with instructions on how to do it yourself!"

Comments

Re:What about a PCI solution?

[Jherico]

That almost certainly won't work. Cable carried HDTV content is not in the same format as airwave carried HDTV content. The coaxial inputs on the card you suggest will probably not be able to interpret the cable signal and convert it to HDTV data. In many areas the HD content available over a cable box is going to be more extensive that what you will get over an antenna. On the other hand most cable companies will encrypt all the channels except the over the air ones (which they are prevented by law from encrypting) meaning the firewire data is worthless anyway.

I haven't found a solution yet for capturing the HDTV data over the firewire port yet, though I have a mac for this purpose. The mac is unable to render the HD content because its an old G4 400Mhz, but it can stream it to disk just fine and I'm able to use a cross platform tool to render the saves streams on my PC. In practice this ends up being more trouble than I'm usually willing to go through, since I can't actually do this for movies (because of the encryption as stated above) but its what I've got. This does at least let you play the MPEG-2 streams on a PC.

Re:HDTV over firewire

[paul_friedman]

These guys: http://169time.com/ will add FireWire to your DirecTV, Dish STBs so that you can do this. They also provide a How-To guide for recording in High-Def.