Nope. The display device gets what can be considered raw data (Be it Digital or analog) and the display device displays based on that data. It does not have encode or decode the raw data.
Raw 1080i HDTV data is about 200Mb/s.
HDTV cameras rarely have a built in encoder (due to cost), but rather capture the raw image data and then they take it back to the studio and hook it to a computer that they pop the cameras tape into and use the multi $k encoders to create an HDTV res MPEG-2 video and audio stream.
I highly doubt we will see a PCI-E HDTV card before July 1st 2005. If HDTV tuners can somehow still be made after that date, I don't see a PCI-E card becoming common until 2007. TV Stations who will buy "DRM computers" to handle HDTV related things would be the first to get them I'm sure too. That's my personal guess.
There are no drivers for OS X, but the drivers are OS'd so if someone wants to take the time to hack them, you have everything you need to do so. Just go to the pchdtv.com site and download the driver source.
Any GeForce 440MX or newer chipset supports XvMC which will offload the CPU of decoding the MPEG2 stream, but you still need around a 1.8Ghz system to handle the displaying of X. A GeForce fx5200 is the most popular card (It has DVI output) and costs around $50 at newegg for the card.
Sorry, but unless you can fork out the $15k+ that TV stations do for a hardware encoder for such high resolution, it's not here. You need the equiv of a 13Ghz system to do this in realtime. Give it 3-5 years and we may see something (either CPU or hardware encoders), but not yet.
I run 3 pcHDTV cards on a amd 2600 (333fsb) and an nvidia 5200. Things work fine, but without the fx5200 that supports XvMC there's no chance of running 1080i and de-interlacing it in realtime on anything sub 2.8Ghz P4 with HT. All AMD's run slower, be it their slower FPU (by about 30%) or their lower speed BUS. I personally max out the BUS on my motherboard whenever I try to watch a show and record more than 2 at once. I'm not going to start another CPU war, but the facts are that Intels do run much more smoothly (video and all) than AMD's do, even 64 bit AMD's. If you do have problems on a 3k AMD, get an NVidia card that supports all XvMC optimization and you'll be happy.
Simply, Yes, it doesn't matter how you get it, including HD-DVD's, HD tapes, etc. They all have one of four types of copy protection like the copy protection bit.
I can confirm QAM in the HD-3000 is not speculation. (The HD-2000 is also QAM capable, but no one has taken the intiative and added support in the driver for it, which is GPL'd. I haven't added it because I don't have cable to test it on). But remember, viewing streams over QAM is only good if the cable provider is not sending encrypted streams, which many do.
I've run software raid 5 for some time and in my experience it has been more stable than running ide raid with promise ide controllers. I have had 2 promise cards go bad but 2 systems running software raid 5 under debian have worked extremely well. Even hot-swapping works well and I've had to use it several times.
Performance with an IDE raid controller is pathetic. You can't get much more than 22MB/s. I can hit 68MB/s reading and 31MB/s on one system with 4 7200 8 MB cache IDE drives. (This system has 2 extra pci ide cards in it so each drive is a master with no slave).
If you want to go scsi then you have software and any ide raid card beat by a long shot. But "personal fileserver" usually means raid is too expensive.
My goal is disk space. I currently run raid 0 off of an ide pci card on 2 drives, both as the only drive on each channel (masters). I bought 3 more disks and will be doing raid 5, including having 2 drives per channel. Right now I can write 13MB/s which is enough. By going to more than 1 drive per channel your bandwidth should not be any less, and maybe if you're lucky a little bit more since ATA 100 should be able to do more than 13MB/s a second. I believe the drives are the bottleneck (Even though mine are 7200 8MB cache), but don't expect twice the bandwidth. One also should never run an ATA 33 drive with an ATA 100 (basically if it's not the same ATA) on the same channel. Both devices will run at the speed of the slowest one.
I also recommend JFS. It's a religious battle but I deal with 20+GB files (HDTV). JFS has given me the best results for being able to manage large files (deleting, moving, etc). CPU usage is low for accessing the FS. Next I'd reocommend XFS.
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.
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.
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.
PGE Park doesn't mind having it, and states how they don't mind it as they have no possition on wifi as Comcast isn't in the market. What PGE Park didn't like how PTP stated, "PGE Park gets Wireless Access thanks to PTP". To anyone who isn't in the free wifi 'know', this sounds like a business deal, and I completly side with PTP on this. The wording/catchphrase/marketing chosen for the announcement is not fair, and I can see why PGE Park has said what they did.
PTP kinda put words in PGE Parks mouth, and makes it sound like PGE Park was fully involved. Future problems could be people complaining about wifi access to PGE Park, or any other 'internet' issues. Worst case could be someone can't make a stock sell, loses money, sues PGE Park because of the announcement he knew of "PGE Park gets wifi acces thanks to PTP", judge see's it, yells at PTP, case dropped, and PGE Park gets some bad press. It's not fair to PGE Park... If anything the title of this slashdot article should be, "Wifi group PTP puts PGE Park in a bad situation with recent announcement."
I personally provide free wifi for my neighborhood and joining the local wifi club soon. Since airspace is shared and not easily seperated there's some things you have to be careful of to make sure bad relations arn't formed in this process, and this is one case to be aware of for the future.. I hope PTP is more careful in the future.
I was just thinking about mythtv/how to record. I talked with the guy doing the card and pointed him to mythtv and he thought it would be good to have his cards work with that as a way of doing his HDTV pvr with the card. (I'm not sure who'll do the intergration yet though)
Next, if you have a HDTV TS stream saved, then you can always have systems around the house with a network card, geforce4-440, and nfs mount the main server recording all the HDTV streams. You could go as far as having the clients diskless and boot off the network. I think we'll see this type of configuration in the next 10 years, in consumer eletronics. My thoughts...
Since HDTV covers all major channels in my area (9/12 of all local channels terrestrial) I plan on only doing HDTV tivo. Reason? easier, better picture, and no de-interlacing issues.
A P4 2.6Ghz (You/May/ be able to do it with a 1+ghz, but I'm playing it safe) 128MB ram 80+ gig 4 HDTV tuner cards (There is someone who is making some for Linux, about about $180 or less/more. The cards get the TS stream from the broadcast/card and can put it to disk, or to an NVidia geforce4-440 that has hardware mpeg2 decoding). Optical out AC3 card Geforce4-440 All near silent fan's
Total cost? about $1.2k
It will be hard to beat that if you don't do HDTV. The main problem with current TV/interlaced is you can burn all CPU on a dual system trying to de-interlace and clean up the image, and that's not doing real-time encoding of the video and audio, and dealing with sync issues.
Many people have been talking about having to have multiple soundcards, or one that supports several inputs. If you use HDTV, you have the sound in the TS stream, and don't need even a real soundcard. Each HDTV TS stream is max 19.6Mb/s That's 80Mb/s for 4 hdtv streams. But, you can always select "alternative" ts streams for lower res/bandwidth/disk space. Today's MB bus's and disk drives can support 80Mb/s (10MB/s) sustained.
I'll see about posting a story to slashdot when I have my system built. The HDTV cards for linux are a few months away or more from being done. I don't mind since the cost of P4 2.6Ghz will drop too.
My experience for the last month in researching is you can hack and play all you want, but in the end the cheapest route is spending more and doing it right. It's true that regular TV tuner cards are $40 but you'll spend more on the other parts (CPU) to try improving all those. You'll see many projects (mythtv) now supports clustering/network encoding. I personally don't want a cluster of systems.:-) Power of running 1 system 24/7 in my power district is about $15/mo. Having 4 systems, over 1, would be an extra ~$450 a year in power costs.
I don't believe there is any truth to your statement. Ransom working with li18nux stuff now, he's not over Caldera - Read up more on them before you post messages like this.
I thought I'd just note, that Channel 2 news in Utah recored one of the ships withen the last week that flew over part of the Salt Lake City area. I think people around here have pictures. If there are any Utah residents who have pictures, can you post them?
Microsoft in the past has wanted to abandon OpenGL for their Direct X platform but hasn't been able to because of how much OpenGL was used and because developers have been upset with non-backwards compatibility of Direct X and other legal aspects. I think there is a good chance Microsoft is trying to cause problems as they have a track record of doing. If Microsoft can put a few bumps in OpenGL's development at this critical time in Graphic Extentions development, they will have a chance of pushing Direct X forward and leaving OpenGL behind. Microsoft has been upset with the ARB since about '94 and has wanted to control graphics in the PC market but luckily SGI kept them from doing this due to some smart thinking on SGI's part. For the last 4 years specifically, Microsoft has been planning and trying to force Direct X onto developers and also give them reasons to not use OpenGL. It's been nice work of certain famed individuals at some unnamed game companies that keep pushing OpenGL over Direct X. If it weren't for their hard work, the work of the ARB, and many OpenGL enthusiasts, OpenGL could have died off by now. For anyone who reads this and appreciates OpenGL, remember to write and thank those who keep pushing for a something that is more "open" than Direct X.
First, they have to build Yucca Mountain. The House Promised Utah officals that if they vote for Yucca, they will not store materials in Utah. As soon as Yucca passed they then announced that they will store Nuclear Material destined for Yucca mountain in the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, about 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. They say this is "Temporary", but I'd be willing to bet they can't store all of the waste at Yucca, and it gets stored at Skull Valley. How nice is that, storing Nuclear waste within 40 miles of over One Million People. There is also a proven track record of poorly and under secured problems with all the nerve gas they have been burning. I would like those who voted for this to move out of their DC area homes and come live where the people they are now killing and destroying their lives live and be the ones hurt by this.
For all the money it sounds like they have spent on nuclear disposal research, they could have installed a large number of solar cells and wind power units that arn't radioactive.
On attempt to go into the "personal profile" page, I get:
Microsoft®.NET Passport no longer supports the Web browser version you are using. Please upgrade to a current Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later.
Well, they let me read all other pages, why not this one?
The architecture of SCSI Harddrives or devices in any case, are designed to handle constant throughput and not need the CPU and IO bus to handle requests. SCSI is also a supieror way to use RAID. True, there's software RAIDs that appear to be a good solution, but they don't give you the same performance, or reliability.
On a side note, IDE's have high burst rates, SCSI is more sustained throughput. Also, my 5 year old SCSI drive still has a 4.5ms access time, most all high speed IDE drives don't have a access time like that, and when using RAID, that makes a large difference.
UID's are cool, but having an easy to remember name, is also worth something.:-) (Including getting many e-mails of people thinking it's their account!
Slashdot Mirror
.. Always a good place to get information on Linux Home Theater PC's too..
c /
http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/howto/linux-htp
Nope. The display device gets what can be considered raw data (Be it Digital or analog) and the display device displays based on that data. It does not have encode or decode the raw data.
Raw 1080i HDTV data is about 200Mb/s.
HDTV cameras rarely have a built in encoder (due to cost), but rather capture the raw image data and then they take it back to the studio and hook it to a computer that they pop the cameras tape into and use the multi $k encoders to create an HDTV res MPEG-2 video and audio stream.
--Brandon
I highly doubt we will see a PCI-E HDTV card before July 1st 2005. If HDTV tuners can somehow still be made after that date, I don't see a PCI-E card becoming common until 2007. TV Stations who will buy "DRM computers" to handle HDTV related things would be the first to get them I'm sure too. That's my personal guess.
--Brandon
There are no drivers for OS X, but the drivers are OS'd so if someone wants to take the time to hack them, you have everything you need to do so. Just go to the pchdtv.com site and download the driver source.
--Brandon
Any GeForce 440MX or newer chipset supports XvMC which will offload the CPU of decoding the MPEG2 stream, but you still need around a 1.8Ghz system to handle the displaying of X. A GeForce fx5200 is the most popular card (It has DVI output) and costs around $50 at newegg for the card.
--Brandon
Sorry, but unless you can fork out the $15k+ that TV stations do for a hardware encoder for such high resolution, it's not here. You need the equiv of a 13Ghz system to do this in realtime. Give it 3-5 years and we may see something (either CPU or hardware encoders), but not yet.
--Brandon
I run 3 pcHDTV cards on a amd 2600 (333fsb) and an nvidia 5200. Things work fine, but without the fx5200 that supports XvMC there's no chance of running 1080i and de-interlacing it in realtime on anything sub 2.8Ghz P4 with HT. All AMD's run slower, be it their slower FPU (by about 30%) or their lower speed BUS. I personally max out the BUS on my motherboard whenever I try to watch a show and record more than 2 at once. I'm not going to start another CPU war, but the facts are that Intels do run much more smoothly (video and all) than AMD's do, even 64 bit AMD's. If you do have problems on a 3k AMD, get an NVidia card that supports all XvMC optimization and you'll be happy.
--Brandon
Simply, Yes, it doesn't matter how you get it, including HD-DVD's, HD tapes, etc. They all have one of four types of copy protection like the copy protection bit.
--Brandon
I can confirm QAM in the HD-3000 is not speculation. (The HD-2000 is also QAM capable, but no one has taken the intiative and added support in the driver for it, which is GPL'd. I haven't added it because I don't have cable to test it on). But remember, viewing streams over QAM is only good if the cable provider is not sending encrypted streams, which many do.
I've run software raid 5 for some time and in my experience it has been more stable than running ide raid with promise ide controllers. I have had 2 promise cards go bad but 2 systems running software raid 5 under debian have worked extremely well. Even hot-swapping works well and I've had to use it several times.
Performance with an IDE raid controller is pathetic. You can't get much more than 22MB/s. I can hit 68MB/s reading and 31MB/s on one system with 4 7200 8 MB cache IDE drives. (This system has 2 extra pci ide cards in it so each drive is a master with no slave).
If you want to go scsi then you have software and any ide raid card beat by a long shot. But "personal fileserver" usually means raid is too expensive.
My goal is disk space. I currently run raid 0 off of an ide pci card on 2 drives, both as the only drive on each channel (masters). I bought 3 more disks and will be doing raid 5, including having 2 drives per channel. Right now I can write 13MB/s which is enough. By going to more than 1 drive per channel your bandwidth should not be any less, and maybe if you're lucky a little bit more since ATA 100 should be able to do more than 13MB/s a second. I believe the drives are the bottleneck (Even though mine are 7200 8MB cache), but don't expect twice the bandwidth. One also should never run an ATA 33 drive with an ATA 100 (basically if it's not the same ATA) on the same channel. Both devices will run at the speed of the slowest one.
I also recommend JFS. It's a religious battle but I deal with 20+GB files (HDTV). JFS has given me the best results for being able to manage large files (deleting, moving, etc). CPU usage is low for accessing the FS. Next I'd reocommend XFS.
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.
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.
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.
PGE Park doesn't mind having it, and states how they don't mind it as they have no possition on wifi as Comcast isn't in the market. What PGE Park didn't like how PTP stated, "PGE Park gets Wireless Access thanks to PTP". To anyone who isn't in the free wifi 'know', this sounds like a business deal, and I completly side with PTP on this. The wording/catchphrase/marketing chosen for the announcement is not fair, and I can see why PGE Park has said what they did.
.. If anything the title of this slashdot article should be, "Wifi group PTP puts PGE Park in a bad situation with recent announcement."
PTP kinda put words in PGE Parks mouth, and makes it sound like PGE Park was fully involved. Future problems could be people complaining about wifi access to PGE Park, or any other 'internet' issues. Worst case could be someone can't make a stock sell, loses money, sues PGE Park because of the announcement he knew of "PGE Park gets wifi acces thanks to PTP", judge see's it, yells at PTP, case dropped, and PGE Park gets some bad press. It's not fair to PGE Park.
I personally provide free wifi for my neighborhood and joining the local wifi club soon. Since airspace is shared and not easily seperated there's some things you have to be careful of to make sure bad relations arn't formed in this process, and this is one case to be aware of for the future.. I hope PTP is more careful in the future.
my $.02
Mythtv/HDTV
I was just thinking about mythtv/how to record. I talked with the guy doing the card and pointed him to mythtv and he thought it would be good to have his cards work with that as a way of doing his HDTV pvr with the card. (I'm not sure who'll do the intergration yet though)
Next, if you have a HDTV TS stream saved, then you can always have systems around the house with a network card, geforce4-440, and nfs mount the main server recording all the HDTV streams. You could go as far as having the clients diskless and boot off the network. I think we'll see this type of configuration in the next 10 years, in consumer eletronics. My thoughts...
Since HDTV covers all major channels in my area (9/12 of all local channels terrestrial) I plan on only doing HDTV tivo. Reason? easier, better picture, and no de-interlacing issues.
/May/ be able to do it with a 1+ghz, but I'm playing it safe)
:-) Power of running 1 system 24/7 in my power district is about $15/mo. Having 4 systems, over 1, would be an extra ~$450 a year in power costs.
A P4 2.6Ghz (You
128MB ram
80+ gig
4 HDTV tuner cards (There is someone who is making some for Linux, about about $180 or less/more. The cards get the TS stream from the broadcast/card and can put it to disk, or to an NVidia geforce4-440 that has hardware mpeg2 decoding).
Optical out AC3 card
Geforce4-440
All near silent fan's
Total cost? about $1.2k
It will be hard to beat that if you don't do HDTV. The main problem with current TV/interlaced is you can burn all CPU on a dual system trying to de-interlace and clean up the image, and that's not doing real-time encoding of the video and audio, and dealing with sync issues.
Many people have been talking about having to have multiple soundcards, or one that supports several inputs. If you use HDTV, you have the sound in the TS stream, and don't need even a real soundcard. Each HDTV TS stream is max 19.6Mb/s That's 80Mb/s for 4 hdtv streams. But, you can always select "alternative" ts streams for lower res/bandwidth/disk space. Today's MB bus's and disk drives can support 80Mb/s (10MB/s) sustained.
I'll see about posting a story to slashdot when I have my system built. The HDTV cards for linux are a few months away or more from being done. I don't mind since the cost of P4 2.6Ghz will drop too.
My experience for the last month in researching is you can hack and play all you want, but in the end the cheapest route is spending more and doing it right. It's true that regular TV tuner cards are $40 but you'll spend more on the other parts (CPU) to try improving all those. You'll see many projects (mythtv) now supports clustering/network encoding. I personally don't want a cluster of systems.
That's my $.02
Correct to my post, Ransom Love is working on United Linux, not on li18nux.
I don't believe there is any truth to your statement. Ransom working with li18nux stuff now, he's not over Caldera - Read up more on them before you post messages like this.
I thought I'd just note, that Channel 2 news in Utah recored one of the ships withen the last week that flew over part of the Salt Lake City area. I think people around here have pictures. If there are any Utah residents who have pictures, can you post them?
Microsoft in the past has wanted to abandon OpenGL for their Direct X platform but hasn't been able to because of how much OpenGL was used and because developers have been upset with non-backwards compatibility of Direct X and other legal aspects. I think there is a good chance Microsoft is trying to cause problems as they have a track record of doing. If Microsoft can put a few bumps in OpenGL's development at this critical time in Graphic Extentions development, they will have a chance of pushing Direct X forward and leaving OpenGL behind. Microsoft has been upset with the ARB since about '94 and has wanted to control graphics in the PC market but luckily SGI kept them from doing this due to some smart thinking on SGI's part. For the last 4 years specifically, Microsoft has been planning and trying to force Direct X onto developers and also give them reasons to not use OpenGL. It's been nice work of certain famed individuals at some unnamed game companies that keep pushing OpenGL over Direct X. If it weren't for their hard work, the work of the ARB, and many OpenGL enthusiasts, OpenGL could have died off by now. For anyone who reads this and appreciates OpenGL, remember to write and thank those who keep pushing for a something that is more "open" than Direct X.
First, they have to build Yucca Mountain. The House Promised Utah officals that if they vote for Yucca, they will not store materials in Utah. As soon as Yucca passed they then announced that they will store Nuclear Material destined for Yucca mountain in the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, about 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. They say this is "Temporary", but I'd be willing to bet they can't store all of the waste at Yucca, and it gets stored at Skull Valley. How nice is that, storing Nuclear waste within 40 miles of over One Million People. There is also a proven track record of poorly and under secured problems with all the nerve gas they have been burning. I would like those who voted for this to move out of their DC area homes and come live where the people they are now killing and destroying their lives live and be the ones hurt by this.
For all the money it sounds like they have spent on nuclear disposal research, they could have installed a large number of solar cells and wind power units that arn't radioactive.
On attempt to go into the "personal profile" page, I get:
.NET Passport no longer supports the Web browser version you are using. Please upgrade to a current Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later.
Microsoft®
Well, they let me read all other pages, why not this one?
The architecture of SCSI Harddrives or devices in any case, are designed to handle constant throughput and not need the CPU and IO bus to handle requests. SCSI is also a supieror way to use RAID. True, there's software RAIDs that appear to be a good solution, but they don't give you the same performance, or reliability.
On a side note, IDE's have high burst rates, SCSI is more sustained throughput. Also, my 5 year old SCSI drive still has a 4.5ms access time, most all high speed IDE drives don't have a access time like that, and when using RAID, that makes a large difference.
UID's are cool, but having an easy to remember name, is also worth something. :-) (Including getting many e-mails of people thinking it's their account!