[mythtv-users] Recommendations for HD capture

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/20/2008 07:22 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Feb 20, 2008, at 3:30 PM, Yeechang Lee wrote:
>> David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> says:
>>     
>>> Count me as skeptical of this.  Every time I go to a sports bar I
>>> see plain old 4:3 SD being stretched to fill a 16:9 screen.
>>>       
>> Again, apples and oranges. The bar owner has no access to (or doesn't
>> know how to tune in) high-definition signals. Neither he, nor his
>> patrons, knows the difference.
>>     
> I actually know the person who set some of the local bars up, and he  
> told me they're set up for proper HD; the bartenders just can't be  
> bothered to punch in the right channel numbers.  This tells me either  
> no one actually knows the difference or they simply don't care.
>
> I'm starting to think HDTV is basically the electronic industry  
> equivalent of corn ethanol subsidies.  The government is steering  
> dollars to an industry by forcing people to buy something they  
> otherwise wouldn't buy on their own.

I'd agree.  IMHO, we (the US) did it all wrong.  Making a switch from
analog cra^H^H^HTV to digital /and/ high def all at once was a bad
decision.  Europe got things closer to correct by switching from analog
to standard-def digital.  They would have been exactly right had the
consumer electronics industry sold them monitors instead of TV's (i.e.
with no tuners).  (They may have actually tried this...  The industry
wanted to sell monitors in the US, but the FCC told them no way.  I
don't know if similar pressure was applied in Europe.)

Don't get me wrong, I think these monitors should have been
high-definition monitors.  However, rather than changing from NTSC
source material to "18-formats-to-keep-it-interesting" ATSC, we should
have gone from NTSC to 480p signals (at 24, 25, 30, 50, and 60
fps--where 25 and 50 would be nice but not required in the US). 
Unfortunately, people not in the know would wonder what the heck you'd
do with those other 1,728,000 pixels if your source is 720x480 and your
display is 1920x1080, so they (and the "always intelligent" media) would
have chalked it up to a greedy electronics industry trying to sell you
something you don't need.

So, there's no way we (in the US, at least) could have done it right. 
Therefore, we're stuck with overly-expensive TV's containing digital
tuners (rather cheap) and high-def digital decoders (not cheap) which
get disabled as soon as you plug in your VGA/DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort cable
from your cable/satellite/Myth box.  We're stuck with MPEG-2, which uses
up to 2x the bandwidth of a similar quality H.264.  With an analog
SDTV->digital SDTV switch, we could have withheld deciding on a
high-definiton standard until the technology of digital video (which has
been changing quickly in recent years) and the cost of processing larger
and larger digital video images in real time (which has been decreasing
quickly in recent years) made a large-scale switch from digital SDTV to
digital HDTV more attractive.  But, hey, past experience says we'll get
to update things sometime around 2052.  (Think March 8, 1941 -> December
24, 1996.)  Perhaps we'll get to do a compatible update in 2008 (though
I don't know what it could be). (Think March 8, 1941 -> December 23, 1953.)

Mike