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Television Media

HDTV On Your PC And Hard Drive 279

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-it-be-nice dept.
Jack Kolesar writes: "So, you want to watch HDTV but you don't want to shell out thousands of dollars for a new television. Well, AMDPower.com has a review of the AccessDTV HDTV tuner card. Not only does it let you watch HDTV, but you can also record it on your harddrive. Yes, the full 19.4Mbps stream of 8VSB is stored in raw format. Now, if somebody out there could just make some linux drivers for it ..."
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HDTV On Your PC And Hard Drive More

HDTV On Your PC And Hard Drive

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  • I thought all of that stuff was supposed to be encrypted and have access controls on it? or am I thinking of something else? I give it two weeks tops before they're in a lawsuit. pity we have to put up with this stuff as it is.

    -foxxz

    • I don't think it is encrypted ... though I am sure somewhere down the line someone in the MPAA will find out that Mr. Joe American rewatched The Weakest Link with his family and will be outraged. :-P

    • Re:HDTV Protections? (Score:5, Informative)

      by thud2000 ( 249529 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:20AM (#2492635)
      According to the article, the recorded video is in fact encrypted - only the specific card that did the recording will be able to play back that particular stream.
      • I give it three weeks before someone comes up with a way to crack the encryption and distributes it everywhere. HDTV2MPEG anyone? Plenty of lawsuits guaranteed for your enjoyment.
      • So just pray your card never breaks...

    • They make their money on advertising...

      They are not going to encrypt it. Watch all the commercials you want.
      I work in TV. It is based on free watching and commercials. Regular TV is not going to become pay-per-view. Because if it was, then someone would come back and give it away for free. That is not how the system will ever work. Anywhere.
      If there is encryption, it is a hardware issue... not the transmissions themselves. I think you might be confusing compression with encryption on this one.

      Guess how much most cable companies pay for CNN?
      Nothin. Find the satellite. Just run the advertisements, please.

      I'm usually very polite on /. but whoever made this "Insightful" was an idiot.

  • Hauppauge? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Doesnt Hauppauge (the WinTV people, for which there are already linux drivers) make a HDTV version of their product?

    They make a WinTV-PVR, and work is progressing on linux drivers for that thing.

    • Re:Hauppauge? (Score:3, Informative)

      by cmowire ( 254489 )
      Yes, but the Hauppauge card doesn't decode the full HDTV stream. They just convert it to NTSC and let you see that.

    • Hauppauge Linkage inside (Score:3, Informative)

      by Argyle ( 25623 )
      Here is the Hauppauge WinTV-D (pdf) [lightpath.net] linkage.

      It appears to do the same thing.

    • Re:Hauppauge? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Quickening ( 15069 )
      yes, hauppauge has had the wintv-d and wintv-hd for a while now. I use the wintv-d to watch dtv on my hdtv.
      In fact there are several on the market now - see www.digitalconnection.com. I have yet to see a card tho that will actually output full ATSC video thru component outputs to an hdtv. When they say "full resolution" they mean vga to a computer monitor.
      hauppauge claimed to provide hard drive recording of the mpeg2 streams with their latest drivers - but I have never been able to get it to work - nor have they answered repeated requests for technical support.

      • Re:Hauppauge? (Score:3, Informative)

        by ddennedy ( 140408 )
        I have a WinTV-HD. Yes, it outputs full ATSC through component output. The big difference between WintTV-HD and WinTV-D is that the -HD has a hardware MPEG-2 decoder so it is not dependent upon the CPU for decoding and so it is not dependent upon the video card for the proper video out signal.

        The PVR function of the WinTV-HD software is quite weak, but I can record MPEG-2 transport streams to the hard drive as long as I do not use the component output mode. Instead, I must use the RGB output mode. I can not hear sound while capturing unless I use the direct AC-3 SPDIF output to my amp, but my amp only has one connector, which I usually leave connected to the digital out connector on the Soundblaster Live for
        DVD playback.

        IIRC, The Telemann HiPix also records standard MPEG-2 transport streams to the hard drive.

        I purchased a 34 inch, 4x3, direct view (tube) HDTV monitor for $1495 from a maker called Sampo. It has VGA input and can display computer RGB output at 1024x768. I run my WinTV-HD at 1440x1080i with the component output.

        The biggest problem I have is with reliable reception even with a decent powered antenna in the attic. Some channels never work unless there is a low pressure weather system.

        Adam Williams' Linux mpeg library can decode MPEG-2 Transport Streams that he can record using a WinTV-D that does have Linux drivers.
        • The PVR function of the WinTV-HD software is quite weak, but I can record MPEG-2 transport streams to the hard drive as long as I do not use the component output mode.
          Some quick questions:
          1. Are the streams saved by this card usable (editable, playable, etc.) in other programs without much fuss?
          2. Does the PVR function also work with analog channels, or will it only record from digital channels? (Analog recording would require either an MPEG encoder on the card or software-based MPEG encoding, vs. just dumping the received MPEG stream from a digital channel to a file.)
          I'm currently using a TiVo with a NIC to grab TV shows and archive them to SVCD. It works, but it's somewhat cumbersome and it doesn't always work. I was thinking of snagging something along the lines of an All-in-Wonder Radeon to add video capture capability as I'm fairly sure it'll handle analog TV just fine...but if the WinTV-HD can do both analog and digital, it would seem to make more sense to go that way.
    • WinTV-HD. $399.00 direct from them.

      www.hauppage.com [hauppage.com]

      Short description is here [hauppauge.com]

  • SGI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BoarderPhreak ( 234086 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:19AM (#2492630)
    FWIW, SGI workstations supported the HDTV format for nearly ten years now... In most video and 3D applications, "HDTV" was also an option - for generating content for this "new format."

    • Re:SGI (Score:1, Informative)

      by steve_bryan ( 2671 )
      Jeez, ten years ago the format currently called HDTV did not exist. So what are you smoking? Still steamed because no one cares about your over-priced hardware which is swiftly sinking into obscurity? Let me take a wild guess -- it isn't possible now and it never has been possible to buy a $500 board that would enable a SGI workstation to receive HDTV over the air? Being a Mac user myself I'm not particularly a partisan of the PC world but the implication that PC are about 10 years behind workstations won't survive any reasonable scrutiny.
      • I said "nearly" jackass. In 1993, at least - SGI workstations supported HDTV format. I'm not sure about before that.


        As for "sinking into obscurity" you obviously have no clue about SGI. They are THE provider for high-end hardware to the NSA. As such, they cannot report their earnings of these sales, appearing to the general public that SGI is a goner. This is simply not the case.


        Rest assured that SGI is alive and well.


        As for a $500 board to receive and watch HDTV on an SGI, why the hell would you want to? That's what a TV is for. SGIs are about CREATING content, not viewing it.


        Here's a nickel. Go buy yourself a clue.

      • Re:SGI (Score:2, Informative)

        by lupetto ( 16876 )
        I used to work exclusively with SGI hardware and software in a broadcasting environment. HDTV output is fairly new in the SGI world - I'm thinking it came out about two years ago. This HDTV input/output board was made only for the very high end servers (only onyx2 servers afaik). Information about the HDIO card is here [sgi.com].

        It is not supported in the most common machines used at TV stations, the Octane and the O2. There have been rumours that an HDTV card was being developed for the Octane, but as far as I know it hasn't been released.

        SGI hardware is, IMO, overpriced. We usually would buy a barebones system (no memory, no monitor, etc) and then buy the parts from third party vendors. At the same time, SGI and the Irix operating system offers much more than you can get out of a standard windows or macintosh system, such as really fine grained scheduling control, guranteed I/O and frame rates, which is very important to engineers.

        PC's are improving (and in many areas surpassing), but are not yet at the level of SGI servers for specialized broadcasting environments.
        • HD resolution is nothing new to SGI. "HDTV" support is. We had 1280x1024 and 1920x1080 demo reels driven by an SGI Onyx RE1 as far back as 1993 (back when our station's most powerful PC was a 66 MHz 486). We had a rackmount gizmo called a RaptorXL that could convert the high resolution RGB signal into a variety of (at that time) currently proposed HD standards. With no usable HD transmission equipment, nor consumer HD television sets, we didn't use it for much other than openhouses and tradeshows. Our Onyx2 from early 1997 came configured with an HD I/O card that worked well with an early Sony HDcam deck. It required an adapter, but other than that we had no conflicts. O2 is a *wonderful* standard resolution video box (especially for it's age, it came out in 1996) but I doubt O2 will ever support HD, at least for editing or effects. While it could easily record and play HD video, it lacks the I/O to handle multiple internal and external 200+ MB streams of data. The nonblocking crossbar switch in the Octane/Octane2 handles it without flinching.

          Octane2 (and Octane with an Xbow 1.4 backplane) supports HD video via the "snowball" DM2 card and breakout box:

          http://www.sgi.com/workstations/octane2/dig_medi a. html

          Like most broadcast products, it only supports noncompressed video, so you'll also need at least two channels of Ultra160 SCSI or three channels of 1gbit fibrechannel. You *do not* want to work with compressed HD until you're finished with editing and compositing, otherwise the CPU and daughtercards spend 75% of their power compressing and decompressing every time you make a slight change.

          We use an Octane2 daily for HD editing and mixing. Source is a Sony HDcam deck controlled by and uplinked to the DM2 breakout box. Video is stored on 8 rackmount Ciprico 7000 fibre disk arrays (RAID 3). It's certainly not consumer, but it works without a hitch. And it's fast.
    • I was planning to get one of these, years ago, until it was explained to me that these were HDTV for Commercial use, i.e. boardroom slide shows or such. None of the equipment was the same as proposed for consumer use. Is this still the case?
  • I think in the future we're going to see a move in volatile memory.

    Instead of things being written directly to Harddrives, etc. I think we're going into the error of solid state memory.

    Yes, this will lead to big problems if there are power outages etc. but I think this will all be "built in".

    The only way this quick retrival is possible is through solid-state solutions...

    The current videos can be stored on the solid state memory as they are transferred to large DB on very fast RAID'ed systems. The index, however, will remain in the solid state memory. This will allow for quick access, etc.

    but.... we all know how expensive that is, or will be.

    So I think until solid-state solutions are affordable, you're not going to have a quick indexing solution.

    There comes a point in time where our physical hardware (HD's etc.) can't keep up with the processing bandwidth (sufficiently, that is) and we're going to need solid state solutions to keep up with those speeds.

    This is one of those instances.

  • HDTV/DTV and TiVO (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sp1n ( 99710 )
    This is the greatest thing to come to PC in years. Now if only it had an access card slot and a satellite receiver, TiVO would have some serious competition (which, since they still haven't turned a profit, might be a bad thing). I, for one, am tired of dragging out the 36-foot cable every Wednesday to record Enterprise for the guys at work (our UPN station is impossible to receive off-air).

    I second the motion for Linux drivers. Imagine a set-top box for the geeks which can play games, do all your usual duties, and all on a screen which is actually readable!

    The future is now. :)
  • ...we could somehow combine this thread and the one for large-scale video archiving to figure out how we can store a full season's worth of HDTV Star Trek...

  • Ah! What timing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <<ten.eriwraelc> <ta> <nallohr>> on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:25AM (#2492664) Homepage Journal
    Sure, now I'm made aware of this, after shelling out relatively large sums of money for an HDTV-ready set and an HDTV receiver (terrestrial and satellite).

    The thought of building up a personal A/V library accessable anywhere in my home has always been a dream of mine: I have about 220 CDs (approaching the limit of my custom stereo cabinet designed to hold "enough") and countless VHS video tapes. I HATE contemporary storage solutions: expandable usually means ugly, and elegant (like my stereo cabinet) usually mean limited. If anything, I want original media archived away generally out of site and out of mind. Thus, the desire for a remote, unobtrusive, media server.

    Timeshifting broadcast programs to some fraction of this server's space is a natural extention of the idea.

    So, such technology would be a welcome addition to my media server idea: besides my main (expensive) HDTV setup, I could have lesser playback equipment in other rooms that could leverage this technology (server side), and perhaps dedicate yet another satellite receiver or two for timeshifting purposes (quite willing to pay another $10 a month for the privelege).

    So, bring it on

  • They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format (Score:4, Informative)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:30AM (#2492684)
    A bunch of posters haven't bothered to read the article and wonder why the MPAA etc don't clobber them. This card encrypts using its serial number, so it can only be played back by itself. If this encryption and decryption happens in the hardware, it might not be feasible to reverse engineer it and get the raw stream.
    • What happens when you upgrade your video card? Do you lose all the encrypted videos you collected over the past year?
    • forgive me for I am no security/encryption afficionado, but, if it's displayed on your screen when you play it, havn't you decrypted it, and I KNOW that there is software out there that will allow you to do a screen capture on this. I'd be worried if it used overlay to do the displaying, but since it's not also a graphics card(although I'm sure some gcards will come with DTV support eventually, or maybe now for all I know), the Decoded stream has to pass through drivers somewhere to get to the card, and those drivers could be hacked.

      Pat

      • Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format (Score:5, Insightful)

        by spudnic ( 32107 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:05AM (#2492871)
        This is exactly what Total Recorder [totalrecorder.com] does (in Windows) for audio. It adds itself as the primary audio driver for the system. All audio directs to it, then it forwards it to the driver for your sound card.

        The upshot to this is that you can get Total Recorder to record this stream in just about any format at whatever rate you want.

        I use this for the audio books I get from Audible [audible.com]. The books come down in some encrypted format that requires a special plugin for Windows media player or RealPlayer, or you can push them to an Audible enabled device (like the Rio).

        Before going to bed, I start the book playing in media player with total recorder saving it out as an mp3 as it goes. The next morning I convert the mp3 to wav and burn it to a standard audio cd.

        This type of circumvention is very easy as long as the stream has to be decrypted somewhere on the motherboard. Having the stream sent encoded to the card and having it decrypt it is another matter. I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to decrypt it.

      • Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format (Score:4, Informative)

        by Noehre ( 16438 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:52AM (#2493090)
        Have you ever tried taking a screen capture while playing a DVD?

        All you get it a black box.

        What the DVD Consortium decided what that a DVD video is sent directly to the video card as an overlay. Basically, the DVD is invisable to the rest of the system. You can't bypass the video somewhere inbetween the disc and the monitor.

        I'm sure they can/will/already do something like this with HDTV.

        • Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format (Score:5, Interesting)

          by inburito ( 89603 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @01:47PM (#2493649)
          That is really just a minor problem. True, the actual framebuffer portion that displays your desktop is not going to have anything but a black/blue/purple/whatevercolor box but still all modern videocards have over 16megs of ram and some of that is going to be used for video overlay buffer.

          Before I continue I should say that I programmed most of the v4l-drivers of voodoo 3500 tv so I do know what I'm talking about.

          Registers in that videocard are going to point exactly to where that buffer is located and accessing it is no different than just mapping that portion into your address space and copying the data from there. There's going to be a lot of data but technically it is possible. And, this way you'll actually get the clean data instead of something that has already been stretched/filtered/de-interlaced/etc by your graphics card..

          To summarize.. If you can see it, it resides somewhere in memory. If you can hear it, it resides somewhere in memory. It might not stay in one place for very long but definetly long enough for someone with intermediate hw-programming skills to capture.
        • Have you ever tried taking a screen capture while playing a DVD?

          All you get it a black box.

          Yeah, I tried and it works fine... my DVD player software, InterVideo WinDVD, even has a convenient keyboard shortcut [intervideo.com] you can type to save the current frame to a BMP file.

          What the DVD Consortium decided what that a DVD video is sent directly to the video card as an overlay.

          Someone must not've relayed that decision to InterVideo then, ah?

    • Re:They encrypt, folks; you don't get raw format (Score:4, Informative)

      by apnar ( 199973 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:05AM (#2492872)
      Some work is already underway to reverse the encryption scheme. Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AccessDTV [yahoo.com]. Not too much activity, but there were some decent things figured out already. Mainly that it looks possible to pull the unencrypted stream from the file.

      Also there is another card that does mostly the same thing (no PVR functions) but doesn't encrypt the stream at all called the HiPix [telemann.com]

    • Get this HDTV card, and a regular TV-out card. Hook the TV-out card into a good ol' VCR (or hooked through a TV-in card which then saves the stream to the hard drive). Boom. Unencrypted content.

    • Why does everybody need the raw stream? There are still fanatics out there who listen to vinyl, and claim that digital does not outperform vinyl played through a vacuum tube.

      Clearly digitizing a clean analog signal is going to be good enough.

  • Hard Disk Space (Score:5, Informative)

    by JohnHegarty ( 453016 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:30AM (#2492687) Homepage
    As this is a 19.4Mbps raw format file. I persume that bits.

    So.

    19.4 x 1024 = 19865.6 Kbps
    19865.6 x 1024 = 20342374.4 Bits Per Second

    Now lets divide by 8
    20342374.4 / 8 = 2542796.8 Bytes Per Second
    2542796.8 / (1024 x 1024) = 2.425 Mega Bytes Per Second

    Now, I would like to record a move of 2 hours

    2.425 x 60 x 60 x 2 = 17460 MB
    or 17460 / 1024 = 17.05 Gb

    Thats alot of space , evan for a 80mb hard disk.

    Just a question someone might be able to answer, how well will this compress ?

    If its a good level of compression, will it allow a new way for the napster type people to break into a new medium.

    • Re:Hard Disk Space (Score:2, Informative)

      by imuffin ( 196159 )
      Yeah, 17.05 GB is a huge file for a 80 mb hard drive. You'd need over 200 of those drives just to fit one movie!

      The video is as compressable as you want it to be. Using mpeg 4, you can get a pretty decent looking 2 hour movie in a gig and a half, so I'd guess that if you wanted to preserve the HDTV look, it would be somewhat larger than that... But just like you can choose quality settings on a tivo, or like you can choose SP, SLP, or LP on a VCR, you can choose the bitrate and compress it to whatever size you want with a quality tradeoff.

      I think its a wonderful idea, and I can't believe there hasn't been something like that for the PC yet. A 5 gig compressed movie may sound huge now, but in a few years it'll be like storing an MP3 album as hard drive sizes increase.

      And once you're playing video on your computer, how long could it possibly take before someone finds a way to break the encryption and then compress the raw stream?

    • Re:Hard Disk Space (Score:3, Informative)

      by bowb ( 209411 )
      MB with a big B is megabytes
      Mb with a small b is megabits

      kB is kilobytes
      kb is kilobits

      (I don't think it matters much whether the K is big or small, but the convention in the sciences and engineering is to use a small k for kilo, big M for mega, and big G for giga.)

      Also note that hard drive makers always use multiples of 1000 for their units:

      1kB = 1000B
      1MB = 1000kB
      1GB = 1000MB

      (RAM of course is always measured in multiples of 1024, e.g. 1GB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024B . And before anyone starts whining that the HD makers are ripping you off of those extra bytes, remember that using multiples of 1000 is an older convention in engineering.)

      I'm glad I've got that off my chest. Now that you understand these conventions, I WON'T HAVE TO COME OVER AND KICK YOUR ASSES.

  • If I have an HDTV...Can I....? (Score:4, Informative)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:31AM (#2492693) Journal
    If I was to purchase an HDTV, could I use it as a 1920 x 1080 (1080i standard) monitor? I have seen that some of the high end units have DB15 inputs on the back. This would make for the ultimate entertainment center when equipped with any of the new high end Dolby Digital sound cards.
  • HDTV has been out since the 80's right? I heard there are two implementations - digital and analogue. Is this true? And speaking of digital television, is HDTV the "new" standard for digital terrestrial broadcasting? Or are there millions of competing standards?

    If HDTV is not the new standard, then I wonder where the card maker is going to make the money from. No one I know has HDTV, and only one channel I know of broadcasts in HDTV (and that's the Japanese satellite broadcaster BS1).

  • There will never be linux drivers for this card (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kagato ( 116051 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:47AM (#2492784)
    This PC Card, like most PC HDTV solutions uses the Teralogic Janus chipset. It's pretty slick, and has actually been aorund for several years. Many major companies use Teralogic, including Tivo.

    I've been trying to get information on the chipset from Teralogic for several months. On Dec 29, 1999, David Auld of Teralogic posted to the video-4-linux mailing list. "We at TeraLogic are interested in encouraging the development of Linux
    drivers for the Janus DTV card." The company went so far as to offer reference cards and driver sets, and was in favor of having a total GPL driver set. You can do a google search to find the archive.

    A couple months ago I e-mailed David on this subject and got a fairly kurt thanks but no thanks response.

    The obvious reasons for pulling out support for the Linux driver are all MPAA based. The content controls comming down the pipe won't be in the Janus Chipset. It would have to be software based. With a linux driver could could patch an HD-Tivo, or your Windows based solution to ignore the content control flags. Most interesting would be trying to wield the DMCA against people on this. It's doubtful a linux driver would ever ack the content flags in the first place.

    • Most interesting would be trying to wield the DMCA against people on this.

      DMCA would not apply to this, and is completely impotent against this.

      The capture card itself is what does the encryption. The HDTV signal is sent in the clear, and accessible to anyone who knows how to build the hardware to receive it. Thus, there is no "technological measure that effectively limits access" to the copyrighted content, so 1201 doesn't come into play if you chose to undo (or prevent) the card's encryption.

      • My reference to DMCA is in regaurds to 5C and HDCP. Not specifically the software encryption AccessDTV is doing. Although the signal would not be encrypted, there will be flags in the stream that indicate if you can even timeshift the show. To date I don't think any of the PC based HDTV solutions support the flags at this time, so it may be moot...for now.
    • Actually, that's probably for the best. It means that there's now strong incentive in the developer community to hack this card and write an open source driver, sans encryption. If they had simply provided a linux driver, there would be little to no incentive.

  • Digital TV/Radio musings (Score:4, Informative)

    by Aztech ( 240868 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:54AM (#2492822)
    Just like the Hauppauge DVB boards... I have one here in the UK and the kick ass, Linux TV [linuxtv.org] not only produce Linux drivers for them but a whole suite of utilities that do PVR functionality, time shiting and 'dvbstream' that actually lets you redirect the MPEG2 transport stream to various other PC's over the network.

    On a related note, I picked up a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) digtal radio receiver [wavefinder.com] the other day, I can save the MP2 baseband strem directly to disk... no loss of quality, you can actually record all the stations within the same multiplex at once since they all come through the same COFDM transport stream. The datacasts are pretty smooth (and quick) too.. take a look [geocities.com] at radio, if they get this into portable devices then this will give 3G a run for its money when it comes to rudimentary information like news, sports scores etc :)

  • TV on computer. Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

    by goober ( 120298 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @10:56AM (#2492831)
    Compaq's already got it...you can read about it at The Onion [theonion.com]
  • ...better monitors will be needed.

    I used to test/troubleshoot profesional video equipment. Until I actually saw it I couldn't care less about HDTV. The problem is that true HDTV runs at 1920x1080 (as I recall). Why is that a problem? Because most monitors won't do that.

    Most of our test bays used standard computer monitors for output, we ran the signal the signal through a box that stepped down the resolution. I still looked sweet, but it was nothing compared to watching the same signal on a real HDTV monitor.

    Granted, most HDTV broadcasts will be at one of the lower resolution standards, so it probably won't matter that much...

    • there are multiple standards.

      1080i is the highest resolution in the standard. (At the time of the standards, 1080p wasn't feasible.)

      720p is the other common resolution, and also looks very nice.

      480p is not much better that s-video, and 480i is basic tv.

      In the above i=interlaced, p=progressive.

      The problem with every tuner card i've seen on the market so far is every last one of them downgrades the image to 480p. Why bother?

      For those looking to buy a HDTV, one of the most important questions is what is the native mode. The cheaper sets may use 720p or even 480p. You want to get one using 1080i.

      I haven't been able to read the article yet as it is /.d

      most broadcasts will be either 720p (Monday Night Football and Super Bowl when they were being aired) or 1080i.

      I use a good monitors that will support 1280x1024@75Hz or better, so I look forward to a true HD card.

      • I use a good monitors that will support 1280x1024@75Hz or better

        The monitors we were using were equal to or better than that, but they still won't handle 1080i. Because of the letterbox aspect ratio, the operating resolution is 1920x1080. There are monitors that will handle that, but they're not within my price range yet...

        There are something like 18 different standards that fall with the broad heading of HDTV, so I have to warn you that your description is a little simplified. I wish it were that simple, but the FCC has decided to let the market work it out, so it's about as standardized as DVD burners.

  • ...that last week, I couldn't think of anything to fill up that new 100 GB hard drive in under 12 hours.

    With the possible exception of high-speed satellite access to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica...

  • Get a clue, people (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kasreyn ( 233624 )
    Half the articles on /. are "Damn the man, fight the RIAA, down with Microsoft!".

    The other half are "here's how you, too, can buy into consumerism and give your money to entertainment megacorps, who will use it to buy fascist laws!"

    Maybe a bit of consistency would remove this bad taste in my mouth, eh?

    -Kasreyn
    • They should start by explaining why the hell anyone would want to watch TV in the first place.

      • DARK ANGEL!

        Okay, the rest of the list:

        Smallville
        West Wing
        any of the Law & Order series
        UC: Undercover
        ER (though fading fast)
        Buffy the Vampire Slayer
        Angel
        Enterprise (still maturing)
        Simpsons
        This Old House (shut up, I like it)
        many things on BBC America
        many things on public tv
        many things on various cable channels

        So stop being such a tv snob and see what's actually on there. It's not all Jerry Springer, ya know.

  • Why can't we build our own? (Score:3, Informative)

    by dschuetz ( 10924 ) <david&dasnet,org> on Monday October 29, 2001 @11:54AM (#2493104)
    Everyone's bemoaning the fact that these HDTV cards don't have linux drivers and use encryption. Well, is there any reason why we can't just build our own cards?

    If the people at SlimDevices [slimdevices.com] can create their own network-based MP3 player with off-the-shelf chips, why can't they (or someone similarly talented) create a little device that takes off-air HDTV signals, feeds it into standard chipsets, and outputs compressed (MPEG-2?) HDTV video over ethernet? Get the little thing responding to simple commands over IP (maybe port 80, just have something in your browser that can handle video/mpeg-2 streams), and you've got a great thing going.

    Make 'em cheap, put a few of these in your basement, have 'em all stream to a big RAID box, and then all you need is for the same guys to build a nice ethernet-to-video box for the set-top.

    Seriously, though -- how available are these chips? Could someone easily build something that takes "GET CHANNEL 37.3" on an IP port and streams MPEG back? If I recall correctly, off-air HDTV streams are *not* encrypted, right?
    • Because there are only a couple chipsets that do it in the first place. And it appears that getting datasheets, let alone actual product is almost impossible with out signing your life away.

      I've tried getting stuff from Teralogic for a while with no luck. If there is enough HDTV sales though it might be possible to see some imports from China and Tiawan that are a bit more lax on the content protections (ala Apex).

      But at this moment it's slim to none you can pick up a digikey catalog and order all the parts.
  • Ummm, guys, this is a problem that was solved 6 years ago. One group I was working with over at Oracle had a ~1.5TB video store, with ~100 realtime inputs, running in testbed to ~20,000 users. In 1995 (yeah - think Pentium 133s as hot machines).

    Part of the solution is that you want to convert to a video format, rather than trying to store the raw frames. MPEG-1, -2, -4, or Motion JPeg are probably your best bets. That should get you a fairly large compression factor over the raw frame data set.

    Some of this technology is still around, if you know where to look. Email me if you want to chat.

  • bad tech background in article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by s.o.terica ( 155591 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @12:40PM (#2493316)
    Wouldn't trust AMDPower's tech history too much -- for example, the reason that monitors flicker at 60Hz while TVs don't has nothing to do with progressive-scan vs. interlaced (in fact, all else being equal, 60 frame-per-second progressive scan should flicker less than 30 frame-per-second, 60 field-per-second interlaced).


    Instead, the reason that TVs flicker less is that TVs have higher-persistence phosphors, i.e. after the phosphors are excited by the CRT's electron gun, the image takes longer to fade away -- a phenomenon that's totally acceptable with full-motion video but not when you don't want your mouse pointer looking smeary.


    For proof of this, ask anyone who has a progressive-scan DVD player connected to a progressive-scan TV -- it certainly does not flicker more than a non-progressive scan player (would be somewhat defeatist, no?)

  • I thought that High Definition TV was dead. Digital broadcasting with adaptors for NTSC / PAL had killed it. As somebody said, people prefer more / better content rather than better definition.

    Who and where is broadcasting HDTV now?
  • What sort of compression are they using?? Even the most optimized Divx codecs aren't that good yet, are they? Say the stream is vanilla 1080i, that's 1920 x 1080 x 16 bit color x 30fps = about 124 MB/sec uncompressed or about 995 Mbps uncompressed. Not including 5.1 or 6.1 channel audio. Compressing that down to a 20 Mbps stream would require a 50:1 codec for the video alone. If it's 24 bit color, the resultant size would be 50% larger and thus require a 75:1 codec.

    So what sorta compression codecs are they using? Please excuse my ignorance as I have never worked with compressed HDTV. My only experience has been on the production end where we used SGI Octane2 and Onyx2 systems with the Snowball DM2/DM3 I/O cards fo uncompressed work. Of course, that required a full rack of Ciprico fibre disk arrays to store the data, but the quality was awesome. On the software end, we used IFX's 'Piranha HD' and Discreet's 'Inferno'.

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