[mythtv-users] Is there an analog/HD tuner out there?

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Fri Jan 19 23:39:38 UTC 2007


On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 05:41:36PM -0500, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> Shawn Willden wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 January 2007 14:27, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> >> What would really be awesome would be something like a HDHR2
> >> (fictitious...) that does HDTV/Analog reception, has svideo input and
> >> then streams mpeg2 for everything.   To top it off it would also have a
> >> cable card slot.
> > 
> > While you're wishing, why not wish for MPEG4?
> > 
> > 	Shawn
> > _______________________________________________
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> > mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> > 
> 
> Sure, I'm game.  :-)

This is not that hard a wish.  People are developing chips to do live
transcode from mp2 to mp4 at low prices, they should be able to
certainly capture analog SD and make mp4 from it.  It's a harder
question if they would do that for uncompressed HD, because the
transcoders are able to take advantage of what the mp2 compressor learned
about the data stream -- they don't just convert the mp2 to uncompressed
and then recompress the way that we typically see transcoding done here.

But we're getting closer and closer to affordable HD compression chips,
and they are being built for the camcorder market etc.   All that's needed
is an entrepreneur willing to produce a PCI card version for the
currently smaller DVR market.

On top of that, however, you'll need very fast A2D converters to
record component video which is analog.   Much easier to record DVI
which is digital, but fewer and fewer STBs are doing DVI, they are
all moving to HDMI with HDCP which screws you over.

However, they don't yet have the guts to disable their analog
component outputs, though there is a push to make them down-res them.
As long as you can get an STB with non-down-res analog outputs you
will be able to make it work -- with transcoding, alas.  But will
that market be big enough.

Sadly, because of the need to transcode like this, a stand alone PVR
is always going to sit at a major disadvantage to a locked PVR which
only needs to do the trivial job of recording the digital stream and
thus gets better quality for far less cost.   Hard to compete.


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