[mythtv-users] PVR-350 + PVR-350 or PVR-350 + PVR-250

Andrew Dodd atd7 at cornell.edu
Thu Jan 15 03:02:06 EST 2004


Quoting Jeff Mottishaw <jmot at mottie.com>:

> >> Is there a recommended approach to recording/watching cable company
> >> supplied HDTV with Myth?
> 
> >There's no way to do it (at least not yet).
> 
> Can't you use an IR Blaster, and the component output (I'm assuming it
> has one) of the Comcast box to get the HDTV channels?
MPEG encoders that will take an HD component signal and compress it to MPEG-2
MP at HL in real time cost more money than almost anyone on this list has.

The only way to capture HDTV on a PC is if you have access to the raw bitstream
somehow.  The options for this are:

An HD tuner that has Firewire outputs.  These are sadly very rare.  The only one
I can think of off the top of my head is one of the first RCA DirecTV HD
receivers with a modification installed by 169time.

A demodulator for whatever transmission standard is being used.  Readily
available for ATSC, no cards exist that work with the QAM demodulation used by
digital cable.  (One wonders if it might be possible to reconfigure a DVB card
to do this - DVB also uses a QAM modulation scheme.)

A device that demodulates the signal, and then remodulates the bitstream in a
different format.  i.e. the first-generation Dish Network HD receiver with the
ATSC modulator added.  That's the only such device I know of.

Theoretically it would be possible to tap into the demodulated bitstream from a
cable box and then capture it.  A long time ago I remember seeing someone on
AVSforum that had tapped into the raw digital video output of his DVD player
just before the TV encoder and routed it to the GPIO pins of a Bt878.  I forget
the name of the exact transmission standard...



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