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Television Media Data Storage Technology

Which HDTV Capture Card? 31

Posted by Cliff from the who-needs-those-free-gigs-anyways dept.
BenderMan asks: "I would like to purchase an HDTV capture card for a *nix based home PVR project. My criteria is that the card support (or be capable of in future firmware) Encrypted QAM, and that the card ignore the broadcast flag. I'll need to make my choice before July 1st, 2005. Of the few cards available that support HDTV, 64/256-QAM support (needed for cable broadcast) is spotty and it's not clear which cards currently ignore the broadcast flag. Can Slashdot readers provide any insight on the FusionHDTV, the MyHD MDP-130, and the HD-3000 cards, or any others I have overlooked?"
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Which HDTV Capture Card? More

Which HDTV Capture Card?

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  • Incompatibility List (Score:4, Informative)

    by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:57PM (#11398293) Homepage
    If anyone has cards, or other hardware, that doesn't work, please point them out to the Linux Incompatibility List [leenooks.com].

    Thanks!

  • Firmware (Score:4, Informative)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:08PM (#11398410)
    If you plan to upgrade the firmware later to add features don't be surprised if one of the new features is support for the broadcast flag. You may not be able to get one without the other. I'd check to be sure you can downrev as well as upgrade and be sure that you have a non-broadcast flag version of the firmware on-hand and tested before performing the upgrade.

  • Good luck with Encrypted QAM. (Score:3, Informative)

    by ERJ ( 600451 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:08PM (#11398416)
    As far as I can guess, no legal card is ever going to support this unless the cable companies offer them. A card capable of decrypting encrypted channels would give access to the pay channels which just ain't going to happen.

    I have heard that some DVB cards have support for inserting a flash card that will allow for some decryption so we may see something like that in the hdtv world someday but I am not holding my breath.
    • CableCard is coming, see:
      http://www.engadget.com/entry/12340003000254 56/

      The first unanswered question is: When?
      The second is (like with just about any new standard) will it be tweaked before it becomes ubiquitous? ie If you could get ahold of CableCard equipment today, will it work with the hardware of tomorrow?
      • Actually it seems that at least timewarner and comcast already support cablecard. It would appear that you 'lease' the cablecard just like you would the digital cable box.

        http://www.timewarnercable.com/corporate/product s/ digitalcable/cablecard.html
        http://www.comcast.co m/Support/Corp1/FAQ/FaqDetail _2651.html
      • Doesn't the CableCard have to be integrated with the decoder? It has to be able to receive signals from the cable company just like a set top box converter. I doubt they'll let you get one that exposes the keys to let you decrypt in software.

        So I don't see any likelihood that you'll be able to decrypt encrypted QAM in the future using current hardware unless the ecryption in cracked.

  • HD3000 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stoo ( 22399 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:18PM (#11398591)
    I've tried the ATI HDTV Wonder, and the pcHDTV HD3000.

    Obviously the ATI is out because it doesn't have linux drivers, and even the windows drivers are a bit iffy.

    The HD3000 is great though.

    Delivery was fast, I got the card the day after I ordered it.
    Driver installation is easy, just follow the instructions and away it goes.

    As for the software, I only really use the cli command getatsc, give it a channel and it just starts outputting an mpeg stream.
    You can then play that back or re-encode as you see fit.

    Broadcast flag is ignored, and I believe they're working on QAM support for it too.

    • Re:HD3000 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ReeprFlame ( 745959 )
      ATI's software always seems to be a bit sub-par. I didn't even know they made HT TV tuners to begin with, but I guess that makes sense. I have an ATI TV tuner in my GFX card, but just don't go that route [if you had the idea]. Go for the pure card that makes sense to you to record well and is made by a known company...
    • Just QAM support, or support for decryption with a cable-company-supplied CableCard?

    • Total crap is more accurate. I haven't used it yet without some type of malfunction. Based on this pile, I'm going to recommending nvidia to anyone who asks about gfx cards until ATI hires some programmers.

  • Encrypted content (Score:3, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:21PM (#11398638) Homepage Journal
    Apparently there is a company using extra bandwidth in ATSC broadcasts to carry encrypted pay channels.

    Many digital cable channels are sent in encrypted QAM.

    With the former, I'm pretty sure that cards like the HD-3000 will happily record the datastream, but will leave it encrypted. I expect that you'll find the same with a card that will record unencrypted QAM streams. You'll be able to record encrypted signals, but you'll have to decrypt them in software.

    Now the question is, how hard is it to decrypt those streams? Is there a decent chance of cracking the keys in software, or is a cable card the only hope?

    • Re:Encrypted content (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )

      Now the question is, how hard is it to decrypt those streams? Is there a decent chance of cracking the keys in software, or is a cable card the only hope?

      Unless somebody uncovers a flaw in the underlying algorithm, you are not going to do any key cracking.

      CSS (the encryption used on DVDs) did get cracked, of course. That was the result of a poorly-chosen algorithm and sloppiness on the part of a CSS licensee. These are mistake the entertainment industry is not likely to repeat.

      • It's even worse than that. (Score:4, Informative)

        by mosel-saar-ruwer ( 732341 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @06:54PM (#11402767)

        Unless somebody uncovers a flaw in the underlying algorithm, you are not going to do any key cracking. CSS (the encryption used on DVDs) did get cracked, of course. That was the result of a poorly-chosen algorithm and sloppiness on the part of a CSS licensee. These are mistake the entertainment industry is not likely to repeat.

        CSS is/was an enclosed system, did not involve a negotiation between peers [i.e. did not involve the potential for an exchange of public keys and the withholding of private keys], and, region-coding aside, did not involve session-based [i.e. individualized] encryption. Therefore it was theoretically breakable [all you had to do was place the de-encrypting software in a "de-bugger" and spend thousands - or maybe millions - of man-hours going over shift register logic to figure out what it was they were doing for the "encryption"].

        The cable services are moving towards a really onerous model, however [onerous from the point of would-be pirates]:

        1) Cable is rapidly moving away from a broadcast-based network infrastructure [where you can put a "sniffer" on the network and "hear" everyone else's traffic], and towards an on-demand switched network [where you can only hear the traffic that is streamed directly to your jack], so that you can't even sniff the network to begin with [unless you were to physically break into your neighborhood's cable switch, and that sort of thing just screams local/state/federal "FELONY OFFENSE"].

        2) Even if you could sniff the network, the new smart boxes and smart protocols are doing public key exchange [in combination with private key withholding], so, unless you solve a Clay-Prize-worthy problem in mathematics [claymath.org], you're SOL as far as understanding what it is you're sniffing [which I guess is the point that the parent comment was making].

        For the near future, the cable providers will continue to offer classic analog broadcast channels [maybe 0 through 49, or 0 through 99, if you're lucky] for backwards compatibility with older TV sets and older set-top boxes, but once you get up around Channel "100" in the newer systems, you're looking at encrypted, switched, on-demand traffic [where the encryption is session-based, i.e. individualized], so dream on.

        PS: I once downloaded one of the new cable protocols - I think it was a story on /. at the time - and, while I can't seem to find it at the moment, I quite clearly remember that there was some seriously tedious, non-trivial communications theory that went into it - enough to make e.g. something like the Token Ring protocol look like a day at the beach by comparison. And if you ever saw one of Laura Chappell's old books with the fold-out diagram of the Token Ring packet, you'll know I ain't talkin' turkey here.


        • 1) Cable is rapidly moving away from a broadcast-based network infrastructure [where you can put a "sniffer" on the network and "hear" everyone else's traffic], and towards an on-demand switched network [where you can only hear the traffic that is streamed directly to your jack], so that you can't even sniff the network to begin with [unless you were to physically break into your neighborhood's cable switch, and that sort of thing just screams local/state/federal "FELONY OFFENSE"].

          Some of the new cable n

  • Shouldn't GNU Radio [gnu.org] be able to do everything and more? Given the right software decoders, you could capture with whatever HDTV encryption, and since it's open source, if the broadcast flag is included (it's not) you could just remove the detection code.

  • Our lab could really use some integration of microscope still shots and closed circuit video into our LabVIEW front-ends.

    Unfortunately, National Instruments wants like $1500 for their video capture cards, which is like ten or twenty times the cost of a comparable WinFast/Hauppauge/ATi solution, i.e. NI is charging you like $100 for the hardware and $1400 for the LabVIEW drivers [the so-called "NI-IMAQ" library].

    I did a ton of Googling, and the best I could find was the ADLINK Technologies Angelo RTV-24

  • Firewire? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @10:04PM (#11404449) Homepage
    This doesn't really help the original poster, but isn't it possible to use an external HDTV tuner (like the kind that a lot of HDTV monitor owners had to buy) and then connect it to your HTPC via Firewire and record the video that way?

    From what I've seen, most of those tuners also have a serial port for changing the channel, etc, so that could be connected to the HTPC as well for control. Using DirecTV with ReplayTV is similar, you can use either the IR blaster to control the DirecTV box or you can connect the two with a serial cable.
    • Existing boxes ($600+) may allow firewire transfers for now, but the new ones will have copy protection built in, possibly even in Firewire (1394/5C). The powers that be want to do away with current DVI and move to HDCP [digital-cp.com] compliant DVI/HDMI which will prevent us from doing anything with the content on our computers unless we're willing to use analog converters. I have a dream, that one day society will unite and boycott the entire entertainment industry and content providers. :-)

      • Re:Firewire? (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by emc ( 19333 )
        I have a dream, that one day society will unite and boycott the entire entertainment industry and content providers. :-)

        Then, seriously, what will you watch?

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

      by 3waygeek ( 58990 )
      It is indeed possible -- I do exactly that, recording the 1394 output of my Motorola DCT6200 cable box on a 300 MHz Blue & White Mac G3. This output is a MPEG2 transport stream, so there are a number of options for playback.

      The DCT6200 can be controlled over Firewire as well, so one can write code to turn the box on & tune the appropriate channel before starting recording (sort of like what VCRPlus does).

      If you're into the Mac, some people have had success using the lib1394 and VLC packages on Li

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

      by peragrin ( 659227 )
      Elgato currently has one for Macs.

      Of course the elgato does no local processing just sends raw data to/from the computer to which it is hooked up. So if you want to decode and play HDTV on a large screen, you need a Dual G5 more/or less dedcated to the task.

      If all you want to do is record, a G4 works well.

  • I'll need to make my choice before July 1st, 2005. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Thing 1 ( 178996 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @11:13PM (#11404862) Journal
    I'll need to make my choice before July 1st, 2005.

    I would imagine that the manufacturers who haven't sold their inventory at that point will "gift" them to employees in return for 50% of the outrageous overprice they'll get selling them on eBay.

    In fact, wouldn't that be a way around the law? Have foreign nationals purchase foreign hardware which cares not about stupid flags, and sell it via eBay?

    Are the broadcasters going to get the government to target eBay sales in order to prop up their morally corrupt intellectual property pyramid?

    • That more or less happens now in other areas of Tech. I have a fairly nifty (somewhat obsolete now but still good) radio scanner, the Uniden UBC-3000XLT. Made in the USA, as I understand the situation, and a darn good bit of kit. The US model is the BC-3000XLT, and I gather it is illegal for my model to be sold in the US. The reason? Apparently the FCC won't allow radios to be sold in the US if they can recieve cellular phone frequencies. US manufacturers are able to sell me the UBC (= unblocked cellular) m

  • Wouldn't it just be easier to move to a country that uses DVB?

    The reason for this being that DVB cards are well supported under linux and there is also no "broadcast flag" crap. With DVB all you have to do is decide whether you need -T (terrestrial), -S (satellite) or -C (cable).

    So, why not move to europe or australia...it'd be easier (and probably cheaper, how much does a fab cost these days?) than getting a digital reciever that does what you want for QAM.

  • I just dropped a FusionHDTV card into my rig. It works great, especially considering it's price. I just recored The Tonight Show for kicks. The quality is fantasic, and not as rough as some of the earlier cards like the AccessDTV card.

    QAM support is a bit shady. I get comcast here, and every now and then a HD broadcast will pop up, but I've had better luck sticking to over-the-air broadcasts (via TERK TV55 antenna).

    It's decoder is all software, and therefore you won't likely be able to use it with a u

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