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HDTV PC Capture Solutions?
Akai asks: "With HDTV DVR's costing upwards of a thousand US dollars or more, I was looking for a HiDef capture card that would work with Linux and an external HD receiver.
The pchdtv card looks nice but it's RF input only for HiDef content, and only supports OTA at this point.
Both DirecTV and DishNetwork HD STBs can be hacked with FireWire ports, but it's not cheap, so I was trying to find a capture card with either DVI or Component inputs, or a converter to take either of those to FireWire. The old Dish Network model 5000 receivers had an option to output HDTV RF but they are no longer compatible with Dish's current HDTV broadcasts.
Google has not been helpful in this regard, and all I've found is professional (>$2000US) format conversion gear.
Is there a PC (hopefully Linux) based video capture solution that can capture the output of a cable of DBS STB (RGBA, DVI, or Component out) without a significant loss of image fidelity?"
This or this???
... you won't be able to find anything like that anytime soon. Although VIA recently released an HDTV chip, but I'm not sure whether that will help or not.
BitTorrent. The world is my TiVo.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Or wait til HDTV becomes proliferated across..
"With HDTV DVR's costing upwards of a thousand US dollars or more"
It's $3 more a month than the normal DVR Time Warner offers.
I know this might not be an option for you, but others might want to know that HD DVRs might just be $36/yr. away from them.
I have been asking the exact same question... without much luck
The way I understand it, DVI is encrypted, so your odds of finding anything in that regard are very low. Composit seems to be your best chance, but as of yet, I havent seen an affordable video capture card.
ATI however, does make a HDTV card, but the problem with it is it only does broadcast free to air type HD, which is basically non existant in my area. If you are in New York, or a similar area, it may be feasible. The ATI card was about 400$ and included an antenna.
Other then that, I think your SOL. Expressvu, rumour has it, is coming out with a 600 HDTV/PVR next year, but Ill believe it when I see it. Also, due to storage requirements, it will only record something in the neighbourhood of 8 hours at HD resolutions.
That's a cheap, well-built solution that would suit your needs. Linux users really need to try harder to force ATI to create a small team for creating these drivers.
One of the reasons this is so expensive is that the amount of data coming in from an uncompressed source (like component cables or DVI) is immense. This is why the pcHDTV card only accepts compressed broadcast streams: it captures the already encoded video stream. A device that can capture raw video would have to compress it before it can be feed to the computer.
So far, I haven't found any either that are designed for cable systems. From what I've read, the cards on the market now are designed for off-the-air recording. The problem seems to be a lack of a universal standard for HDTV encoding on the cable systems.
For now, I'm extremely satisfied with my home made HTPC and non-HDTV cable broadcasts. I've retired my VCRs over quality, recording convenience and playback convenience issues. You can see my home theater PC on my site.
http://pchdtv.com/hd_3000.html
The samsung SIR-T165 can capture OTA HD broadcasts. It has firewire out ports.
I've hooked it up to my Mac, with a piece of sofware called VirtualDVHS and captured HD streams off of the device.
HD Streams gobble disk space like you wouldn't believe.
I think they may even have made a model that does satellite feeds also, with firewire ports, but you'd have to check around, and maybe hit ebay.
Reeses
Your best bet right now (and probably forever) is to get one of the HD digital tuners that's available ASAP, because after the INDUCE act kicks in, they'll all have that nasty broadcast flag thingie. And then (not sure of the costs once HD proliferates) just get a regular ol' input card with component or VGA or DVI inputs or whatever. Basically, you'll have two separate cards if you want a full-featured HDTV capable PVR box.
Never mind about the VIA chip. It's the VT1625 and it's an encoder chip, so that won't help you unless you're connecting your computer to your HDTV.
Adelphia offers the scientific Atlanta 8000HD for $8 a month. Works very well too.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?p roduct_code=314569&pfp=cat3
It is 150$ after rebate, i do not know if you are going to build a PVR, if yes. this is what you want to be able to record HDTV on your PC and watch it back on the TV using Win MCE 2005, MythTV, FreeVo, and some more PVR software !!!!
The problem with recording HDTV is that you have to generate a MPEG2 stream from the component or DVI signal. Real-time encoding of HDTV signals takes vastly more work than encoding NTSC signals, so you can't buy a consumer-priced card that does it.
Fortunately, HDTV is broadcast as a MPEG2 stream to begin with (with additional error correction). So you can get a tuner card that simply saves the raw data that is broadcast. This works great for over-the-air signals. For satellite and cable, you need to get to the signal after it's been unencrypted, but before it's been decoded. Your two options are to use a decoder with firewire output, or to put your recorder into the decoder box (like TiVo does).
Several months ago i spent time researching an HTPC (Home Theater PC) with the intent to have it do everything from HDTV, XM Radio, DVD Player, Music box w/ iTunes, etc.
From my research, specifically, into HDTV, I discovered that all the cards only will decipher over the air (yes, with an antenna) HDTV signals and not HDTV from a cable or satelite provider. Highly disappointing. While I do live in the NYC area, I could have gotten an antenna and received NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox all in HDTV over the air, I could not receive HBO, Discovery HD, etc. Because of this current limitation, I temporarily gave up on the HTPC and am waiting for more reasonable resources.
Oh, and something else I found, the FCC has declared that all cable providers MUST have firewire interfaces on their decoder devices as of May 2004. This would mean you could connect a PC to your cable HD converter in order to record programs, but it does not mean that once the programs are on your PC, you will be able to access them from anything other than your cable box.
I hate to say anything good about TimeWarner, but for $6.95/mo they have given me their HD DVR. Works pretty well. Can record 2 channels at once, and supports HD recording as well.
I tried getting a "Media Center" type device together. El Gato has a decent offering on the Mac, but short of that, there isn't much out there. I don't mind not owning the equipment cause it will probably be outdated when IPTV comes. For the price, it can't be beat.
can be found here. It also gets regular TV signals. Dunno if it does HD over cable or not, but if you want linux support, this is It.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Unless i've totally missed it... there's not a good way to get HDTV content via cable onto the PC.
There's the firewire pull content/control from the hdtv box. The mac folks seem to have the easiest time with this...
There's OTA terrestial DTV cards (like the linux hdtv card mentioned, and ati's HDTV wonder)
There's a QAM capable card out there Fusion III QAM HDTV Tuner Card(no idea on linux drivers), but that's only useful if your cable company does NOT encrypt their QAM signal...
Ideally, IMHO... we need some sort of PCI CableCard docking device, but I doubt our content controlling masters will allow that. Although, the more CableCard ready HDTV sets I see, gives me hope that someone will take the chocolate and peanutbutter and come up with PC HDTV PVR reeces peanut butter cups...
a PCI card that was CableCard ready would allow legitimate digital cable subscribers to watch digital cable on their PC/etc.
You can get HD PBS for free with FTA DBA satellite cards.
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
This comes up on AVSForum all the time. In a nutshell: the HDTV you get over-the-air, that gets beamed to your satellite box, or zapped to your cable box is a compressed transport stream that fits in the same bandwidth as an old-fashioned analog signal.
:)
The satellite/cable box then decodes that stream to produce the full HDTV-resolution signal, that gets delivered to your monitor (either via analog component or digital DVI/HDMI).
That full-resolution bandwidth required to re-digitize/re-encode the full bandwidth signal to a recordable transport stream is currently beyond the capabilities of any pc-based solution under that $2000 price-point.
There are only two close-to-usable solutions so far: IEEE-1394 keeps it's delivery from device to device as the compressed transport stream. The problem being that most transport streams from these devices are encrypted. Some aren't. You might get lucky. The other is to find a tuner tuner card that can decode the QAM signals that cable companies use. The problem being again, that most cable companies encrypt those signals (at least those you can't get over-the-air anyhow).
Check back in about five years.
Kineska: Cinema, soapbox, music & musings
The DDA in USA has a UDFF AGBG standard that might UTFF when the FCC allows XYZ in 2005, _IF_, that is, the USDHS doesnt outlaw it due to new NCIC regs that will effect the UDFF and UFDDA of IOPPUOIN, otherwise they will have to create a new agency to monitor such HDDTV bandwidth (similar to the way they currently handle UHF and VHF)
but then again , everybody knows that
Here's an idle thought I had. Probably more effort than it's worth, but an interesting exercise...
Devise a circuit to take a 720p component signal, and convert it to 4 s-video feeds, one for each quadrant of the raster (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right).
Feed these to 4 standard def mpeg2 capture cards (PVR250, etc.).
Do some mpeg processing magic to combine the 4 captures into one stream, handling frame synchronization and sound from one of the cards.
I have NO idea if such a circuit is possible, and I don't know enough about mpeg2 to even suggest potential algorithms.
I'll let those with a little more clue dismiss the idea or generate their own little light bulbs and start a project...
Steve (CoffeeBreath!)
-- If you don't understand it, blame it!
I agree.
But I would also like to point out that there is a *huge* market for a "wife proof" AV solution.
Of course, when I say "wife proof", I mean "non techie" proof. The former certainly isn't politically correct. I realize that. However, in my case, it is what I'm seeking.
Basically, the whole concept of multiple sources and multiple remotes has failed miserably. It is too wonderfully complicated. We shouldn't require a flow chart to operate the AV equipment. Here's what we need:
1) A communication method for devices that does not rely on line of sight. My programmable Sony IR remote works great except for those cases when the sun is setting and interrupts a portion of a macro, etc. Then the whole system needs a technician.
2) Discrete on and off codes for this system. See problem #1.
3) No more AV component switching. Just daisy chain all the damn stuff and give each device a priority. If I want to watch a DVD, then I turn on the DVD player which has priority over television content. All devices recognize this priority and do their own switching accordingly. Additionally, a single box that does everything (TV, PVR, DVD and Media) would simplify greatly. I'm open for realistic alternatives.
4) A friggin' industry standard. If everyone wasn't trying to make a buck for themselves, we'd be light years ahead.
What am I missing here?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Wait a year, and it'll be cheap. If you can't wait a year, then it's worth it to spend the money now.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The new Comcast DVR (Motorola 6208) allows capturing
of the HDTV stream through FireWire. It's a little tricky to get it working. I needed to patch libavc1394 to recognize the device correctly. Once that works you just need to send it a signal to start sending the stream (dvcont record) and then you can capture it with ddr1394. The Comcast DVR is $9.99 a month here, so that's a cheap way of capturing HDTV.
Whyeryeu muckin around wid Linux or Windows for dis?
Macs been capable in video and HDTV for a while now. Sweet and simple.
You could have a new iMac or PowerMac with the money and hours you
spend getting Windows, let alone Linux to do your chore for you.
Why use anything else?
Regards,
Roger Born
writing.borngraphics.com
"Sorry. No Refunds."
A HD capture card where the signal is then transmitted through RF?
At first sounds like someone recording a symphony for an eventual release on SACD but then using their mom's answering machine to record the concert.
I looked into it a bit more. The RF is actually a coaxial input. Which means it's the same exact input you'd get from, say, Comcast or your local cable provider. I don't have time to do a lot of research but isn't this what you're looking for? Is there something I'm missing?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Probably not exactly what you are looking for, but I have a FusionHDTV3 HD tuner card and I'm pretty happy with it.
Pros:
- Supports OTA ATSC, as well as some support for QAM64 and QAM256 (unencrypted only).
- No broadcast flag hoops to jump through.
- Recorded DTV programming is saved directly to disk as non-DRM'd MPEG-2 TP files (with full AC3 audio) that are easily converted to MPEG-2 PS format.
- Recorded NTSC (analog) programming is saved in MPEG-2 PS that could be transcoded easily for DVD.
- Image captures are saved as TIFF at full
resolution.
- Cheap: ~$150
Caveats:
- Output is only via your video card (overlay). Works with DVI, but tweaking video card resolutions to those that "HDTV-ready" televisions like might be a pain.
- Only RF inputs, no component/DVI
- No Linux support that I'm aware of
- Works best with ATi RADEON-based video cards (can offload more CPU work)
- The recording scheduler is buggy--like first year compsci student buggy.
- Slow tech support response
- Haven't tried using it with any of the popular HTPC apps yet
- Needs a decently-strong HD signal (18db+), a Radio Shack amplifier
i don't know if it was based on anything else, but on some Mac site i read about a piece of software that used the firewire output on the back of digital cable boxes. you just connected it to your machine with a normal firewire cable and the software could capture HDTV. supposedly if you have digital cable and your box does not have a FW port you can demand one (some FCC rule because some HDTV ready TVs have firewire inputs?). it seems only the HDTV channels would come through the port though, so on my system that's maybe a dozen channels if you had the full subscription package.
i realize you wanted a linux solution, but if there is this OS X solution that require no additional hardware, and some shareware software... maybe there is a Linux version? or could be? sorry i forget where i saw it and the name, i just stumbled across it a few months back. i dont have FW cable box and i am awaiting the PVR cable boxes to upgrade so i'll cope till then.
Did you guys have some kind of critical acronym deficit this month? I can barely see any lowercase letters in there...
I had to go to the library to do some research last night. It bugged me that I wanted to watch "West Wing" and couldn't. So while I was there I hit up usenet to grab LAST week's show which I also missed.
I was surprised to discover that, as of 7PM CST, last night's show (which would not be seen here for another hour) had been posted 11 hours earlier, most likely from an HD capture in euroupe. So, I got both shows. While I was at it I also grabbed the last couple Enterprise eps (620x320-ish avi), but I'm sure everyone here already knows about those.
If I had been on a "real" computer instead of my underpowered laptop, I could have watched last night's west wing (hi-def cap, but 480x480 svcd) an hour before it even aired in the US. I thought about getting a tuner, too - but why bother to do it myself when I can get it from someone else even quicker?
Your post is tongue-in-cheek, but honestly having tried to uncork the lingo of HDTV hardware hacking, you really do run into a lot of acronyms that take you nowhere if you can't find the glossary. Techies would benefit from remembering that their docs need to speak to someone who's learning the skill being describe, not proofing it.
You can't record uncompressed HDTV signals on your PC without a really muscular hardware-based encoding system. The raw, uncompressed signal is too much bandwidth to put to disc and I'm unaware of any consumer-level MPEG chips capable of real-time encoding of an HD stream.
.5-.75 real time encoding to MPEG. You can do it faster, but the quality sux0rs. And yes, there are pro boards that can do this, but for $$$$ and they're *only* real-time, not multiples of real time.
The solution would be a CableCard based TV card. CavbleCard is the new standard for enabling digital/HD/premium cable tuning capabilities directly in TVs and other devices. Basically you get a smart card from the cable company that fits a slot in the device, providing the authentication and decoding capabilities otherwise provided by a cable box. You still can't do interactive stuff like PPV and some of the stop/start movie functions, but for HBO and digital tier channels you can finally ditch the cable box.
With a CableCard based TV card, you'd be able to do what DirecTivo and cable-provided DVRs do -- take the *pre-compressed* signal off the cable line and write it to disc. No encoding required, no encoding hardware required. Playing these files just means pumping the data through the tuner portion of the card as if you were watching a live stream.
The challenges for most would be (A) will they authorize CableCard for PC-based DVR setups and (B) would there be any easy way to transcode the files to open standards? My guess is "maybe" for (A) and "unlikely" for (B). I'd wager that "they" really, really don't want people getting even well-encrypted/encoded HD video on their hard disks.
Slightly off topic: Why aren't there inexpensive real-time or faster MPEG encode/transcode boards for the PC? There are so many DVD recorders that use hardware encoding setups these days, that it would seem trivial to provide a hardware MPEG trans/encoding setup for PCs for a couple of hundred dollars. I hate spending
Try this card from DVICO. As long as your provider doesn't encrypt the QAM signal (probably does for HBO, Showtime, & the like) you can capture HDTV in full quality.
--------------
David O.
Well, it sure would be nice if everything were connected via some sort of GigE or faster switched interconnect, and only turned into an actual video signal at one point.
Have one wire to each device. There's no reason I should have to worry about whether the VCR is before or after the digital cable tuner... or before or after the DVD player... or should be choosing channels with one remote, playing DVDs with another, and controlling volume with a third. Universal remotes are a bad hack... they either don't have all of the features needed, or are more complex than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
I bought a Sony TV, Sony VCR, and Sony DVD player in hopes that the remote control situation would be mitigated a bit. The TV remote can be programmed to do either the VCR or the DVD player. It also inexplicably sometimes changes channels on the TV when it's set to change them on the VCR. Since I'm tuning through the VCR, changing the TV from one of its inputs to its tuner gets me a nice blast of static. The DVD remote can control the DVD player and the TV's volume, but not the TV channels.
A switched digital media network would be sooooo much easier to have good integration. Menus could be cascading from a central device -- no more worrying that the stupid little feature button for one of the devices isn't on the other remote control.
*sigh*
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
ATI however, does make a HDTV card, but the problem with it is it only does broadcast free to air type HD, which is basically non existant in my area.
Since free-to-air decoders are all we're likely to see for awhile, it's probably best to offload decryption to your set-top receiver.
Therefore, even though pcHDTV has no more stock of the HD-3000, and none are available on eBay, it's worth exploring. HDTV input support may be limited to RF, but one can circumvent this problem with nominal quality loss by using a (semi-)pro HDTV scan converter. Maybe this one is affordable? This one is probably much cheaper, but I don't know anything about it.
Using a scan converter is a sub-optimal solution, but other than being useful gear in general, but it does allow you to get over both the adapter and decoder stumbling blocks.
Quasi-related side note: as a PC-to-TV solution, scan converters have substantially better output than TV-out cards.
YHBT. YHL. HAND. :)
Please help me to understand the problem.
My understanding: Current HDTV cards can only receive Over-The-Air HDTV format. This means that they can't be used to capture HDTV signals from cable or satellite providers because cable and sat. use different encoding formats. The OTA format probably complies to some standard and the cable and sat. guys do their own thing? Is this true?
So, basically, OTA/cable/satellite signals all need some kind of transcoding into the "real" HDTV format that your "HD-Ready" TV understands?
Is the OTA format compressed? Would capturing the OTA signal require less bandwidth/storage than capturing the HD signal that goes from the receiver to your TV? If so, I've read that HDTV is about 25-27 Mbps. Is that for the compressed OTA or for the signal that hits your TV?
What am I missing here?
The fact that IR is unregulated spectrum that doesn't interfere with regulated spectrum, and that if everyone wasn't out to make a buck for themselves they wouldn't bother going through all the trouble and exense of designing and manufacturing this stuff in the first place.
In this regard, while I do have my problems with some of Chesterton's ideas, I think he was right. The issue isn't so much that people are trying to make a buck for themselves, but that for some reason attention has actually shifted away from making bucks to making sure the other guy doesn't make a buck.
They're paying more attention to screwing the other guy's business than they are toward running their own.
This is a result of confusing the idea of market share with profit, a confusion that ultimately lead the dot com bomb and other economic attrocities.
KFG
I get an HD DVR from my cable provider (Time Warner) for only $4.95 a month. They charge the same for the regular DVR. I can record 2 shows at once, or record one and watch another, and the drive will record 60 hours of regular TV or about 30 hours of HDTV, or somewhere in between if you have some of each. Considering I was paying $12.95 a month for my TiVo service that can't record HD nor 2 programs at once, this was a no-brainer to drop TiVo and get this.
...say the Slashdotters as they goober in front of their computer monitors for the 18th hour in a row.
Simply get a cable box with 1394 enabled, then download either of these depending on your needs.
/w HAVI support this software if great (and is only $99)
o verview.h tml
DVHSTOOL
http://kgbird.com/DVHSTool/
Or if you have a 1394 enabled TV
Vividlogic's Firebus
http://www.vividlogic.com/products/dtvr_
I have a TV with HAVI/1394 on it so I just used the vivid logic software. However I found it just as easy to get a Scientific Atlana 8000HD box from my cable provider (time warber). It cost me an extra $2.50 a month from the package I already had. And the unit came with a 160GB drive.
I hate to be a "Me Too" voice, but...
So, for various and assorted reasons, I have had to recently re-purchase the following items:
And I still had my 5.1 receiver.
Between all the weirdness hooking everything up, and then configuring EACH unit, I must have spent a good 4 to 6 hours beating on this system to get it to work (Not to mention that my receiver forgot it had all 6 speakers, and needed to be reconfigured as well!)
The AV Guys (TV/HDTV/DVD/Game Console makers) ALL need to come up with some sort of intelligent daisy chaining scheme. I mean, really, SCSI has worked for years, why can't they get it together for AV equipment. They can put a little push-button on the back of the equipment to select a priority number, and then when I decide to play on the GameCube, it would just automatically override whatever else I was watching, without having to make me select which stupid input I want.
Really, having a printout on the side of my TV to remind me which TV input to use for each device is just silly, and is one of many reasons why grandma and grandpa won't spend money on any of these new gadgets.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Point a webcam at your TV and record it that way. Problem solved!
(Seriously though, if you had multiple webcams aimed at different parts of the screen, and software to reintegrate the video streams... let's see them DRM that!)
Why wouldnt the pchdtv 3000 work?
I have a DVR/HDTV cable box from Comcast. It has a firewire out.
I am able to send the MPEG2 Transport Stream down to my OS X machine via a couple of tools available on OS X (AVCBrowser, etc.), and then open it directly using VLC, and show it on my cinema display. Pretty neat stuff! I watched a recent Patriots game in HDTV with some friends this way.
That stream eats gigs of HD space fast, though!
And it's most definitely not "wife-proof"... yet
No this story is not regurgitation-bait!!!
The pcHDTV card cannot do what this person is asking!! I too am looking for an answer to the question of capturing HDTV signal as component, or DVI.
The reason this question needs asking is that a card capable of doing this represnets an "analog hole" for HDTV (I know its not technically really analog anymore, but it would still be a hole). A card capable of component capture would be able to "intercept" HDTV in between the cable box and the TV. Now with this type of card the broadcast flage MIGHT be able to be ignored. There would be a number of non-infrining potential uses for this card. If the INDUCE act is not passed a composite capture card would, in my opinion, be legal. If it is passed a consumer composite capture card will never be made.
Basically the poster's looking for a pvr-250 with composite input instead of svideo input, that encodes to HD formats. The answer is one doesn't exist yet (outside of professional equipment), but I really hope one is made.
The SA8000HD isn't great, but it does HDTV. It isn't as smooth as a Tivo, and the software isn't fantastic. But it CAN record 2 channels in HD or SD at once, while I play back previously recorded content. It was FREE and in NYC you absolutely cannot watch cable without a set-top box (thanks to bitch cable pirates).
I'm renting my HDTV PVR box for $25 CAN/month. It has a built in 160GB SATA HD; it does program guides, etc, has HDMI (DVI+digital audio in one), component and firewire outputs (although I think the firmware I have disables firewire). Apparently, the box can be purchased for $500 CAN also.
Look, I agree that it's a good idea to take yourself away from the TV and really read, or go out and get some air.
But realistically, $2000 spent on entertainment equipment you can use for years probably is a better entertainment value than $2000 spent on a trip. It's something that will possibly enhance your day-to-day life more, depending on how much enjoyment you can derive from the content offered.
Personally I don't like much TV, I have an HD receiver myself (on Dish) and while some things are pretty interesting to watch, I would say it's only just worth the cost of the HD receiver. But I would never claim anyone else was wasting money on same without knowing what they enjoy.
I'm just saying keep an open mind and don't deride those that find enough entertainment in such things to make them worth the cost and effort.
That said, I do think it would be a better world if more people were creaters of media rather than consumers. But that could be another good reason to put togeter a nice HD setup, if you can also generate HD...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lack of an actual market. The pcHDTV cards can support QAM in hardware, but they haven't bothered implementing it because nearly everything on cable systems is encrypted, so being able to demodulate the data doesn't help you at all.
Thanks to the broadcast flag BS from the FCC, there will likely never be a solution for anything other than recording OTA HD, or at least not for a LONG time, because realtime compression of HDTV content into a usable format (MPEG-2 for example) at an economic price is a LONG way away. Encoding 1080i in realtime requires thousands of dollars worth of dedicated hardware. General-purpose processors are probably over a decade away from that goal.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Treat yourself to unending reinstalls of the software is more like it. And don't forget you need an ATI DX9 capable card. And it only gets OTA, no cable, no satellite. And it records in a proprietary format, not the transport stream. Oh, and don't try this with a AllInWonder graphics card - these specialty, high end graphics cards from ATI don't play nice together.
It works, once you get it running, but it isn't what I'd call a "fun" weekend(or full-summer-break) project.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Reading Cicero, Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare and Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night; and between Shakespeare and Burton you have the essential plot of every fiction show that's ever appeared on television, only with better writing. Available for free download at Project Gutenberg.
The net connected computer has been a Godsend for lovers of literature, and you can even get your exercise in at the same time if you power your rig with a bicycle driven generator.
KFG
Doesn't work under Linux and likely never will (die TeraLogic die!) and from what I've heard its receiver is less sensitive than the MDP-120. (The 120 is also Linux-incompatible).
The end result - after being in my comp for a few months, the MDP-100 now sits on a shelf and has for over a year.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'd love a solution which lets me re-distibute HD signal all over my house.
You see, with NTSC, this is a snap. Rack up your components, buy a frequency-agile modulator (multi-port or several singles, your choice), and some pass-band filters. Now, just take the output streams in baseband from your favorite components and remodulate them to free channels above your analog cable device or local OTA, and reinsert the signals on your CATV wiring in the house. In my house, that would be channel 70 for the DVD player, 80 for the main TiVo, and 90 for the main amplifier output (i.e.: whatever is playing in the living room). Now you can stroll to any TV and see regular TV/cable, or flip to the high channels and watch a DVD, or TiVo, or just put whatever's on the main system on (great for when you're cleaning up the house).
Now, I can't do this with HD...yet. With the TS on a carrier signal, output over coaxial, I could have HD on any HD-enabled set, with no special QAM, cablecard, or sat receiver necessary at every TV. Simple, and just about impossible.
Gotta love technology!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I found myself in the HDTV dilemma last month when the picture on our 17 yr old 27" Sony finally became too dim to even watch in a darkened room. AFAI was concerned, enen tho we're not big TV watchers, an HDTV was our only choice.
We found a 27" CRT Samsung model [HDTV receiver built-in, TPX2775H] for $700 - so you don't necessarily need to spend $2000 for HDTV. It fit into the same space as the old Sony. I was blown away by the huge improvement in the OTA HD picture (vice digital cable).
We just ordered the HDTV-DVR box from Comcast for an added $11 per month. I'm looking forward to investigating the possibilities regarding offloading the HD video via the FW port - but it'll have to be dirt-easy for me to bother with... TV just ain't that important to us... we'd just like to be able to snag some old movies when the mood hits us.
What am I missing here?
.fr would put it, the programs are designed to prepare your brain for the commercial breaks
the hollywood idiots don't want that to ever happen
See, as the boss of the most important TV channel in
why the fascination with the "all digital" stuff that hollywood doesn't want anyone to have ?
do like the pros do... use analog between stupidly locked up systems...
I think you may be confusing Composite with component. The site states the card has composite video in. This is different than Component Video in. With Component Video you will have 3 RCA cables, composite has one.
I thought if you bought all your kit from the same manufacturer, and wired it up with SCART leads, that was what happened anyway? There are standards for passing data over SCART (not sure if different manufacturers' kit works well together tho') so you can send your preset frequencies from the TV set to your VCR/DVDR, and many remotes can control another piece of kit {from the same manufacturer, naturally}.
My DVD+RW recorder can do this when used with a Philips telly. Its remote will even control a Philips TV set -- or, by sheer good fortune, a Daewoo {which is what I have}.
SCART has always included self-switching signals using analogue voltages, so that playing a cassette would switch the TV straight over to the VCR; but I think the newer stuff is a lot more sophisticated. Can't really comment, though, since I have no reason to replace my TV on account of the fact that it works.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The SA8300HD box is buggy and routinely misses programs that I've scheduled for recording for no apparent reason other than it just isn't in the mood at the time.
As someone who works at Time Warner Cable, I can tell you exactly what the problem is. You have a poor signal going to the box. If your Tuner level is -10 dbmv or below (along with poor FDC and RCD signals), the box will not be able to lock onto that channel properly. Sometimes, it may have a good enough signal at the start of the recording but then drop off. This can be the primary reason for the effect of seeing the DVR record, but will not finilize the recording to the list when finished. If the tuner signal is really bad though, it wont even attempt to record even when scheduled to do so.
Life is not for the lazy.
Kona-2 card, by AJA
http://www.aja.com/
Works on a Apple G5
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
SCART is inherently a EU standard. Show me a US tv with a scart connector...
This is off-topic, but what the heck :)
:)
Modern AV receivers can help a lot with this since they can now "up-convert" signals from any video source and send them out via component. This means that you never have to change the video input on your HDTV. Note that manufacturers say "up-convert" but they really don't convert the signals.
For example, my DirecTivo has SVideo out, plugs into my receiver, and it switches that signal over to the component out to my HDTV as a 480i signal. This means that your AV receiver is the only thing doing the switching (Provided that your display can accept 480i signals on it's component inputs, and you don't use DVI). I've got the Denon 3805 and this works great. This has recently been trickling down into lower priced receivers from Denon, Yamaha, and Pioneer. Maybe it's time to upgrade your older AV receiver
I found this in my research but I cant find any real specs about the thing: Pyro A/V Link
Get a Pronto universal touch screen remote. Get the recharger base and an RF extender.
Get someone who knows what they are doing to program it for you, unless you want to spend 4-8 hours doing it yourself. You can download other people's configs off the net, but no one is going to upload a config with the exact set of equipment that you have.
In the end you'll have one remote that can control everything and uses RF so you don't need line of sight. It will also have one-button macros for whatever you want, like sending all the codes necessary for you to switch to a DVD, for example. You can program the touch screen to put whatever buttons or combination of buttons you want wherever you want, on multiple screens with custom graphics, even.
There's your solution. The problem that hasn't been solved for the non-techies is having to pay someone else to set it all up for them.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
HDTV Wonder Remote Control Edition.
Here is a review of the product and some reviews by users.
This problem has been plaguing consumers for decades.
The Consumer Electronics companies (you know who you are) do NOT want you to mix and match components from different manufacturers. One way, albiet a disruptive way, to enforce this is to make components interact with each other poorly. Aside from a few standards they can't get away from (like S-Video, RCA jack and the like), they go out of their way to make your life miserable.
H. Gordon Selfridge is spinning in his grave.
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
Yeah, you certainly can't build a good component analog HD capture system for a reasonable price. While there are lots of analog SD capture cards, since analog was around in SD for so long, professional HD has pretty much always been digital.
I have a game company client who needed to be able to do real-time screen caps of game play at HD. What we did was have them do a VGA output at 1280x720 60 fps. We then ran that through a converter box to take the RGB VGA to a component digital HD-SDI signal. That went into a BOXX HD capture system, using the Cineform Prospect HD real-time wavelet codec.
Works like a champ, but expect to pay at least $25K for that setup today. Probably half that next year. But there simply isn't a lot of demand for component analog HD capture, which means that's going to be a specialist, and expensive, part for a while. Moore's law doesn't quite apply to analog to digital conversion circuitry.
Pretty cool to watch recorded game play at 2.5x the detail of a high-end DVD.
My video compression blog
If you can intercept the digital stream, you can save it. The ATSC (OTA) tuner cards you mention, as well as the QAM ones do this.
But once the video has been decoded, like on a DVI or component connection, you have to re-encode it. That means capturing about 62 MB/s and then encoding HD in real time.
The codec doesn't matter, as long as you have a decoder, but candidates would include MPEG-2, MPEG-4, h.264, WMV9, etc. However, good luck finding a computer fast enough to encode any of these formats in real time. So you need dedicated hardware. But since the number of customers for such a device is limited (today it's TV broadcasters), the prices are extremely high.
Xesdeeni
Sigh. My wish is to be able to capture ANY HD content and play it back ANY number of times at ANY future date. I don't feel a need to be able to make any except backup copies, and possibly transfers to new types of media (HD-DVD).
So, here we have Digital Cable, whose content is likely encrypted; and whose premium content is even MORE likely encrypted.
BUT we also have the OpenCable spec, and the "CableCard," by which any DTV device can display encrypted cable content.
Now, the CableCard spec itself is protected to the extent that it's likely no one will create an "open" CableCard interface, i.e. there will NEVER be a PCI-slot DTV tuner card which has a CableCard slot. (I could be wrong about this; someone could reverse-engineer the interface to CableCard, which looks susiciously like a regular PCMCIA/PC Card. However, the DMCA makes any such device illegal in the USA.)
It looks like that spells the end of HD MythTV. :-(
But, I wonder about one last possibility: Could a person save the encrypted content, and then serve it up later to a CableCard-equipped TV? Either by re-modulating a QAM signal, or perhaps over FireWire (if the encryption is compatible)? Does anyone know enough about CableCard to say whether that would work?
(And then - I wonder how hard it would be to add FireWire as a video output device in MythTV?)
Suggestion: Build a PC with an HD-3000 card and MythTV, use the "Video Out" from the cable box as the "Video In" to the HD-3000 card. Controlling, I have two possibilities. The easiest is to program the cable box to go to the channel you want at the time you want to view (actually record) the program, and program MythTV to record the "Video In" signal at that time. Two steps, but much easier than the remaining possibility, which is to: Have the MythTV PC run an infared transmitter that sends commands to the Digital Cable box. That isn't so hard, but the PC might need to know what's on the cable box's screen, and software to extract the on-screen text from the box's displayed menu and make sense of it would be a challenge to a funded team of programmers. I think that some work on this has been done (the commanding via a transmitter part, not the interpreting the cable box's on-screen display part).
Heck ATI still doesn't have an acceptable Windows driver for that product.
We are the 198 proof..
I have a site that I have been trying for some time to organize information on hdtv video recording. It's still not very well organized, but here it is.
HDTVRecord.com
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Buy an SGI Octane2 with the uncompressed HDTV option and youre good to go. This is a 'Personal Computer' which will do exactly what you ask.
Nothing you can buy 'off the shelf at the mall' will do this however.
The PCI bus is simply inadequate for this task, and even PCI Express etc. is probably inadequate too.
Hopefully this kind of application will drive computer manufacturers to introduce faster interconnects, since the CPUs and memory busses are certainly fast enough these days.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
... http://elgato.com/ for an outstanding array of HDTV to computer solutions.
... they are only aimed at Macs -- so it's not a bad catch unless you've adopted the x86 architecture or Microsoft operating systems as a religion.
Of course there's a catch
I'm delighted with my EyeTV 500, pulling in broadcast HDTV, MPEG2 encoding it, and passing it through Firewire to disk, with easy editing, scheduling future recordings, and export to Toast or iDVD.
I'm sure that if you want to wait, Microsoft will eventually get their Media Entertainment Center to smoothly mesh and do all the things Macs will have been effortlessly doing in the interim, and in only a short time after that the Linux folks will have managed to adapt the Windows solution to their needs.
I'm not trolling for flames here, just pointing out that this is an option. I believe you can run Yellow Dog Linux (or other PPC-flavored Linuxes) and use something like Mac-On-Linux to run OS X alongside Linux, if Linux is a personal must-have, but I wouldn't divide the computing resources between 2 systems without a fast dual processor, and I don't believe Mac-On-Linux supports the G5 yet.
Forget about capturing the YUV output of your satellite box. Electronic components are extremely expensive and the kind of ADC you need to capture an analog HDTV signal is unaffordable.
My understanding of why the PC cards don't support cable HD is that the cable providers encrypt their HD signals. It's really a way for them to get more money. If you want their HD, you either have to rent their digital cable box, or a CableCard. These let you plug your signal right into a CableCard supported TV with no box. I've heard mixed stuff about the cablecards - but it seems to me that one of the video card companies should come up with a tuner that takes the CableCard. You'd still have to rent it from the provider, but it would give us what we're looking for!
"The satellite/cable box then decodes that stream to produce the full HDTV-resolution signal, that gets delivered to your monitor (either via analog component or digital DVI/HDMI).
That full-resolution bandwidth required to re-digitize/re-encode the full bandwidth signal to a recordable transport stream is currently beyond the capabilities of any pc-based solution under that $2000 price-point."
If the "satellite/cable box" can decode it, and doesn't cost $2000 why isnt there a card that can do the same thing?
You know, that's REALLY interesting....
Could you, maybe, provide a link to one of those "magic" boxes? All I've ever seen (and I HAVE looked) are switch boxes for cable/s-video/Left,right,picture. I have yet to find one that does that with an HD signal (Either DVI, or 9 RCA jacks at a time) (9 jacks=3 picture jacks+6 jacks for my 5.1 stereo)
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Presumably they are happy to take a loss because the buyers can't then jump to satellite easily...
Anyway, the 6208 (and presumably it's higher-end brother, the 6400 both allow direct recording to a firewire port, al though one reviewer said it just wouldn't work for PC, only Mac). of the post-decryption bitstream.
Some people have used the Immersive holo3graph II. It isn't marketed as a PVR-capable card, but it is rumored to work with certain Windows capture software - and it does support DVI input. They are a bit hard to come by, but you'll see them on ebay from time to time.
3) No more AV component switching.
A year or two ago I bought an "intelligent" A/V switchbox that switched composite and s-video, and would even convert composite inputs to s-video outputs. But the great thing was it switched to whatever source you just turned on.
I had DirecTV on #1, DVD on #2, VCR on #3, videogame on #4. While watching the Sat, turn on the DVD, poof! Turn off the DVD, and back to sat. Worked great. Unfortunately, I don't have it anymore, and can't find it online to give you a link.
http://www.pchdtv.com/
Continuing the off-topic trend, you can get a HDTV 3 color (also known as "component") video out for your Gamecube. Holding down the "B" button when you start a game will give you the option (if the game supports it) of 480p output. It does make a noticable difference.
As for a component-capable A/V switch, I recently bought a Audio Authority 1154 HDTV Component Video Switcher. It is just great. Sadly it only has four inputs, and a single output, but it also switches optical digital, coax digital and RCA stereo sound. All automatically. Not a bad unit.
I'm not the seller, and am not affiliated with the company in any way. I just like the product.
I wanted to do the same thing: Record Discovery HD and ESPN HD from my Dish 6000 to a MythTV box I'm planning. I would like *everything* in one box, a box that I control. The PVR 921 looks nice, but I'd like everything in one place. So I started thinking--how can I get that MPEG stream out of my 6000? I found 169time.com, but as mentioned, it is expensive. Another disadvantage is that it requires another PC to convert their proprietary 1394 stream into something that DVHS, PVR programs etc. can understand. Still another is that it won't record the SD satellite channels--just the HD sat & terrestrial channels. It occurred to me that they must be tapping the MPEG stream from the 8VSB/8PSK lines, before they reach whatever switch or buffer there is in front of the MPEG decoder. It certainly seems doable to me to improve on it by capturing the stream as it enters the decoder, with a clock to tell you what bandwidth is needed. However--this is not at all cheap! To get your full 1080i or 720p MPEG stream, you are going to need to capture and reframe and stream out the data at up to 80Mbps! So you need one of those ARM-core processors with a built in 1394 or USB2 controller; then you need to write the capture and framing software & a corresponding driver for your linux box on the other end (preferably as a plugin to MythTV). Is it possible? I think so. Is it worth spending the $$$$ on? Probably not--though it would get your around the broadcast flag for as long as your 6000 lasts & Dish sends signals it can understand.
Here:
This one has a lot of fancy features for video processing, but no audio switching.
This one switches audio as well but it lacks support for DVI, and it doesn't convert digital analog on the audio. OTH it has 7 inputs...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This is exactly the path that I've chosen as well, with almost good results.
The remote that came with my STR-DE845 receiver would be the best remote ever, except for one or two fatal design flaws. See, on the surface, this is an extremely simple remote, with no more buttons than necessary. This makes it great for parents, wives/girlfriends and other non-techies to use. But it also has a flip-open feature, that reveals all the buttons a techno-geek could ask for. Unfortunately, DVD's were pretty new to the market when this remote was designed, and there is no way to navigate a DVD menu with the simple set of buttons. This would be acceptable, if you could simply flip open the cover, and use the cursor buttons found there to navigate menus. But when you flip open the panel, the remote assumes that you want to access features of the receiver, and not the current device. So, you have to do two more button presses to tell it you want it to send DVD signals instead of receiver signals. This is less than intuitive, and I myself sometimes forget this all important step. If you forget, and start hitting the cursor keys without switching modes, you end up adjusting critical receiver settings, such as front/rear/mid speaker volumes or balance, surround mode, and equalizer setttings. I've regretted to this day showing my girlfriend the flip open panel, because it's inevitable that she'll mess up these settings trying to get to some special features on a DVD.
If it wasn't for this shortcoming, this remote would be the best designed remote, ever. I prefer it's ergonomic shape to that of any other remote I've ever used. It has a small LCD display to give the user some feedback (although they didn't do as much as they could have with it.) And the flip open panel lets you get down and dirty when you need to. If they simply would have set the default to the current device, rather than receiver, on opening the panel, I would be satisfied.
It also inexplicably sometimes changes channels on the TV when it's set to change them on the VCR. Since I'm tuning through the VCR, changing the TV from one of its inputs to its tuner gets me a nice blast of static.
Check the settings of your TV. You should be able to 'lock' it to one of the video inputs. The feature is called 'channel fix' on my Sony TV.
Also, if you happen to go for Sony equipment that is one or two levels above the basic entry level models, they usually include a feature called S-Link. This will automate things a bit. For instance, switching the receiver or TV to the proper input when the DVD player is turned on, or play is started.
Since I still use the TV's internal tuner, the TV needs to switch from tuner/S-Video input when changing between DVD's and television. The remote is smart enough to send the TV the proper command when necessary, but this is kind of a hack. Since the TV doesn't accept remote signals for about 10 seconds when it's first turned on, you need to reselect DVD after this 'warm-up' time. Again, this confuses the heck out of my girlfriend. (The remote sends all necessary power commands when you switch functions, so I've taught the g/f to just select DVD or TV or VCR or CD, and everything necessary gets the proper 'power on' command from the remote. But with the 'warm-up' delay, the TV doesn't receive the 'switch input' command also sent by the remote.) Also, since the TV and receiver are about three feet from each other, you need to have a good angle from the remote to get signals to both devices. Unfortunately, the TV was the first component I purchased, and I was unaware of S-Link, and went for the cheapest Sony TV that had S-Video input/output. Of course it lacks the S-Link. Had I gone for one model higher, I would have had it. Of course, this is only an issue with my setup, where I still use the TV's built-in tuner. If I were using a set-top box (or other external tuner), the T
Heck ATI still doesn't have an acceptable Windows driver for that product.
Newsflash: ATI doesn't have an acceptable Windows driver for *any* product.
How many times have you had ATI software lock up a machine? I've even had it trash partition tables on crash.
Absolute garbage. Even though the hardware is good quality and theoretically does what I need, the cards are useless.
At the very least, they should be open-sourcing drivers for obsolete products.
Don't ask me about the time I installed over 150 ATI AIW Pros at a Toronto TV station... then had *no end* to the problems when Windows 2000 came out and they wanted to upgrade a year later.
Unless they start to take their responsibilities to produce working (and free of silly UI "embellishments" which makes ATI's MultiMedia Center look like it was designed by a 14-year-old anime fan with Downs Syndrome) software for their hardware, their hardware shall remain utterly useless, and I shall continue to warn people away from it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Please...please shoot them. We hate squirrels and it costs us money (and there are an endless supply of the bastards). They chew on the cable for one reason: to reduce the length of their front teeth year after year.
Note: They love the feeling of gnawing on plasted and the metal braded shielding. Vile little creatures they are.
Filthy fat squirrels. Get them we will!! Our *precious* cable.
Life is not for the lazy.
Wow, I wish somebody would mod the parent poster up, as I had not yet seen the "Audio Authority 1154 HDTV Component Video Switcher" that he managed to find.
Thank you, Srvivn21.
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