Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's kind of impossible to get a useful answer to your question on Slashdot... You see, if someone gives you a valid link to something that is actually useful, it gets modded up. It will immediately sell out, and you're back to square one. :-)
WHY would you want to waste your time even doing that? What's the point? There are DTV tuners on USB sticks that are likely easier to hack than some single-purpose hardware like these converter boxes!
Not quite what you asked for, and I don't know if you can use your coupon (I'm guessing not)... but the HDHomeRun allows you two capture MPEG streams. It integrates well with MythTV. It has an open source library. Pretty sweet little device in my opinion.
If you're looking to hack something you should use your own money to buy one and not mine.
If he has an analog-only TV, he is entitled to a coupon. End of story.
The poor people who didn't act earlier are also entitled to a coupon, but not his coupon. Any problems that the program is having getting coupons distributed are due to government incompetence, not coupon recipients.
These coupons are paid for from the proceeds that the government made selling the old TV bandwidth. They compensate TV owners for the diminished value of their property resulting from the government action, so the coupon fund is not your money to begin with.
Tivax makes a converter box which is only about $15 with a rebate card and has a serial port on the back. I got two of them with my coupons. You can control the unit through the serial port (turn on, change channel, zoom, etc). You don't get access to the digital signal, what you get is a good quality analog picture at standard resolution, which your analog PVR can record. For me this was what I wanted; the HD stream itself is a deluge of data; you really don't want to capture it at full-res if you'll be watching on an SDTV. (In fact my old PVR box isn't fast enough to replay full HD video streams, it requires considerable CPU). I am using wish scripts to send the serial commands. Perhaps somebody has written code for MythTV to use it by now.
For the chipsets used, you can check the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CECB_units .
But as to hackability, I seriously doubt that ANY of these unit are sophisticated enough to run a real OS with some hacking potential. If you're a hardware wizard, you might be able to do something, but I don't see the value in spending lots of time trying to hardware hack a box which costs $10-$20 out-of-pocket.
What are you talking about? There are no "holes" to be patched--MPEG2 transport streams are unencrypted. Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.
The infamous Broadcast Flag--the only element of DRM to have ever loomed over broadcast television--is dead and buried. Besides, none of the DTV converters currently available have any DRM-compliance built in.
Barring the highly unlikely event that Congress decides to modify the ATSC spec after tens of millions of TVs with DTV tuners are owned by consumers, there is zero chance of DRM becoming an issue with digital television programming.
There was nothing in the program about it being for poor disadvantaged people. They are for anyone affected by the lack of analog OTA signals. If you were affected, you were eligible. You just assume that anyone who still uses OTA signals rather than cable of satellite is poor and disadvantaged.
Digital broadcasts in the United States are much, much better than their analog equivalents. You won't be getting HDTV with one of these converter boxes, but you'll be getting the SD sub-channel, which has the advantage over analog of zero static.
That's because the digital signal simply breaks when static is encountered, as opposed to analog which degrades gracefully. Digital transmission does provide a lovely image, often better than cable, but only when the signal is strong; analog has a far wider reach, which is very important for anybody not in the middle of a city.
Sigh. Not your fault, but yours is the first post I've seen that actually tries to answer the question. To find your post I had to skim past 100 posts that say things like:
I swear, Slashdot conversations get more and more solipsistic every day.