[mythtv-users] Getting started questions

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sun Sep 19 02:47:03 UTC 2010


On Saturday, September 18, 2010 07:48:43 pm Kevin Ross wrote:

> > I think based on this response I am going to scale back my initial
> > thought of recording 2 and watching 1.  In that case I could just get
> > one PVR and save $200.  I think what I have read and my thoughts have
> > been confirmed - most of the tv cards for computers will not record HD
> > and that the HD PVR is the only option right now if I want to record
> > HD shows.  True?
> 
> No, this is not true.  Tuners cards will record HD just fine, as long as
> the source isn't encrypted.  So recording from an antenna, or any HD
> channels on cable that aren't encrypted, can be recorded just fine on a
> computer.  An example of such a tuner card is the Hauppauge HVR-2250.
> The HDHomeRun also records HD from antenna or unencrypted cable.

You may have misunderstood something I said. I said the only way to record *baseband* HD is the HD-PVR.

"Baseband" means the actual video signal, not something modulated onto an RF carrier. The carrier is modulated by the 
baseband signal, and baseband is what is recovered by demodulating the RF signal.

Other types of HD, like over-the-air ATSC channels, and unencrypted QAM from a cable system, already contain an encoded 
stream, so all you have to do is demodulate the signal and write it to disk, no encoding needed, just demodulate the RF 
signal, and write it. 

So perhaps I should have said the only way to *encode* baseband video is the HD-PVR. There's no point in demodulating the 
signal and using it to feed an encoder, since it is already encoded to start with. If yu want ti in some other format you 
are best writing it in whatever format it was transmitted in, then transcoding to what you want, no point in encoding it 
twice.



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