Anyone make their own DVR with a HDTV PC card? You know re..

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Ive seen a few cards that can get unscrambled signals from cable but
with non-HDTV obviously you can anything broadcast on cable to record
in a TV tuner card etc as long as your cable box unscrambles it and
you hook up a cable from it to your card input.

Can you do this with ANY Hdtv card as long as both the cable box has
the proper out and the TV card has a proper input? And what would
that connection be ? HDMI ? And do any cable boxes you can get from
TIME WARNER etc had such an output? And do the cards have such an
input?

 

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"John@Smith.com" <xxxxspud@newscene.com> wrote in message
news😱urks01l35id4f227pdq5tb37picthg78n@4ax.com...
> Ive seen a few cards that can get unscrambled signals from cable but
> with non-HDTV obviously you can anything broadcast on cable to record
> in a TV tuner card etc as long as your cable box unscrambles it and
> you hook up a cable from it to your card input.
>
> Can you do this with ANY Hdtv card as long as both the cable box has
> the proper out and the TV card has a proper input? And what would
> that connection be ? HDMI ? And do any cable boxes you can get from
> TIME WARNER etc had such an output? And do the cards have such an
> input?

Short answer: No.

Long Answer: Non-HDTV cards can tune to an analog signal generated by the
cable box through either composite video or RF (channel 3 or 4). This is a
low tech capability from the cable box.

HDTV cable boxes do not output HD pictures in the same format that HDTV
cards can use. The output is either uncompressed raw video (component video)
or DVI/HDMI, which is a digital format that none of the current batch of
HDTV cards can accept as inputs. The reason is more political than
technical. If this was possible, perfect digital copies of HDTV content
could be made. They don't want you to be able to do this. This could change
some day, but AFAIK no one offers this today.

You might say, why can't someone create a card that converts the raw
umcompressed component video into a digital OTA format that an HD card can
receive? The answer is this is not a simple conversion. You need very high
end equipment that is not ready for consumer use (i.e. it is very
expensive). You are essentially creating a mini ATSC broadcast studio. Not
as simple as the SDTV cable box conversion.

Brad Houser
<not speaking for Intel>

 

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Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

"Brad Houser" <bradDOThouser@intel.com> wrote in
news:cqetce$907$1@news01.intel.com:

>
> "John@Smith.com" <xxxxspud@newscene.com> wrote in message
> news😱urks01l35id4f227pdq5tb37picthg78n@4ax.com...
>> Ive seen a few cards that can get unscrambled signals from cable but
>> with non-HDTV obviously you can anything broadcast on cable to record
>> in a TV tuner card etc as long as your cable box unscrambles it and
>> you hook up a cable from it to your card input.
>>
>> Can you do this with ANY Hdtv card as long as both the cable box has
>> the proper out and the TV card has a proper input? And what would
>> that connection be ? HDMI ? And do any cable boxes you can get from
>> TIME WARNER etc had such an output? And do the cards have such an
>> input?
>
> Short answer: No.
>
> Long Answer: Non-HDTV cards can tune to an analog signal generated by
> the cable box through either composite video or RF (channel 3 or 4).
> This is a low tech capability from the cable box.
>
> HDTV cable boxes do not output HD pictures in the same format that
> HDTV cards can use. The output is either uncompressed raw video
> (component video) or DVI/HDMI, which is a digital format that none of
> the current batch of HDTV cards can accept as inputs. The reason is
> more political than technical. If this was possible, perfect digital
> copies of HDTV content could be made. They don't want you to be able
> to do this. This could change some day, but AFAIK no one offers this
> today.
>
> You might say, why can't someone create a card that converts the raw
> umcompressed component video into a digital OTA format that an HD card
> can receive? The answer is this is not a simple conversion. You need
> very high end equipment that is not ready for consumer use (i.e. it is
> very expensive). You are essentially creating a mini ATSC broadcast
> studio. Not as simple as the SDTV cable box conversion.

Give Hauppauge a couple of years and they will do it. It's really no
harder than hooking three bt878 chips in parallel and souping them up in
speed to handle 1080i resolution.

--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667

A false witness is worse than no witness at all.

 

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Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

> HDTV cable boxes do not output HD pictures in the same format that HDTV
> cards can use. The output is either uncompressed raw video (component
video)
> or DVI/HDMI ...

Some cable and satellite set top boxes now support IEEE-1394 which is
capable
of carrying the original compressed bitstream from the STB to a DVR. In
fact,
federal law now allows any cable consumer to demand a cable STB with a
IEEE-1394
port from their cable MSO. In www.avsforum.com is discussion on how to do
this.

One gottcha however. Copy and redistribution flags are finally starting to
be utilized in
terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasts, and if a show is flagged for
protection, it
forces DTCP copy protection to be applied to IEEE-1394 outputs (fyi - and
HDCP
copy protection to be applied to DVI and HDMI outputs), which means the
device
on the other end of the wire must be DTCP capable and compliant. Some DVRs
on
the market are, but I am not aware of any DTCP compliant setups for PCs, as
PCs
are generally considered hackable and unsecure.

> They don't want you to be able to do this.

Content providers and broadcasters are generally supportive of traditional
NTSC VCR
like activity, even with digital content. "Traditional" means its a personal
copy that stays
within the home. What content providers and broadcasters are struggling with
is having
personal copies float out the front door, over the internet, and so on.
Just last week I
downloaded BitTorrent to see what all the rage was about, and in a matter of
hours,
had tracked down the entire lineups of Seinfeld, Star Trek and a zillion
other shows,
many in high def, most in pristine original-digital form.

Again, you can buy High-Def VCR and DVR devices today that are IEEE-1394
with
DTCP compliant, and you can hook them to the newer terrestrial, cable and
satellite
STBs that support IEEE-1394 with DTCP. Its a controlled ecosystem that
doesn't
generally permit PCs.

Thomas Gilg

 

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Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:34:40 GMT, "news.cup.hp.com"
<thomasDELME_gilgDELME@hpDELME.com> wrote:


>
>Content providers and broadcasters are generally supportive of traditional
>NTSC VCR
>like activity, even with digital content. "Traditional" means its a personal
>copy that stays
>within the home. What content providers and broadcasters are struggling with
>is having
>personal copies float out the front door, over the internet, and so on.
>Just last week I
>downloaded BitTorrent to see what all the rage was about, and in a matter of
>hours,
>had tracked down the entire lineups of Seinfeld, Star Trek and a zillion
>other shows,
>many in high def, most in pristine original-digital form.
>

It's been my experience with VCRs over the last 20 years, that
collecting is just going to end up a major storage problem for you. On
top of that the replay value is rather minimal in retrospect.

I think services like Netflix are a reasonable way to get access to
stuff you want to see without having to find, download, burn, and
warehouse the stuff.

I wouldn't want to waste my time burning every episode of Star Trek 😉