Most Hackable Coupon-Eligible DTV Converter?

An anonymous reader writes "So I've finally gotten my DTV coupons, now I have to choose a converter before the analog signals go dark. I'd like to get one that is hackable, but haven't had much luck finding information about the internals of the units available. My question is: What chipsets do the different coupon eligible converters use, and which one is the most hackable? It'd be great to be able to send my own MPEG stream and have it displayed, or to grab the raw stream out of the device."

Comments

Re:Why bother?

[AJWM]

analog has a far wider reach,

This is, of course, bullshit, at least in my experience.

My HDTV picks up both analog and digital transmissions with the same set of cheap rabbit ears perched on top. The digital signals are far superior, some of the analog channels are unwatchable (unless you enjoy watching triple ghosts with heavy overlay of snow, and sound that sounds like frying bacon).

I picked up a couple of cheap converter boxes for the analog TV and VCRs. When I went to test them out, not wanting to mess with my existing antenna setup, I just attached a little 2" stub antenna with a coax fitting directly to the box. While it certainly didn't pick up as many channels as the rabbit ears, it picked up all the main network digital channels without a problem. (By way of comparison, the same antenna connected to the analog TV directly didn't pick up squat.)

Signal reach is highly dependent of course on transmitter strength, and in the middle of the city you should be (on average) closer to the transmitters than out in the middle of the boonies. Because a digital signal can reject the kind of echoing you're going to get with signal reflections off of buildings in a city, you're going to get a better picture with digital.

(And actually the digital signal doesn't "just break"; at the fringe you'll get periods of good stable image with the occasional blocking or mosaic if something temporarily interferes with the signal. Beyond that, yeah, it's just off -- but there's no "graceful" to the way an analog signal would have degraded by that point.)