I looked up my postcode on BBC digital TV website and was informed that I can’t get terrestrial digital TV (DVB-T) in my area untill 2011 or so. Which sucks. So my two options for digital TV are to get cable (DVB-C) or get a satellite dish (DVB-S), both of which cost more money than I’m willing to pay. I was also talking to Stewie on #ilug who educated me on the subject of DVB.
DVB is an mpeg2 stream which I wanted to record and dump directly to a hard drive. Thus I wouldn’t need a high power processor for transcoding, I’d only need the internal bandwidth available on the SATA bus. I could also use an mpeg2 decoder card to play files, reducing the need for a high power processor again and keeping power consumption down.
Unfortunatly via DVB-C I have to use the cable companies set-top box, which dosn’t let me do anything interesting. Via DVB-S I can only get the BBC channels and ITV. What about Freeview I hear you ask? Well Freeview is a group of chanels that are encrypted (apart from the aforementioned) which are descrambled by a set-top box. Again, these set-top boxes only give analogue output.
What is the point in getting Digital TV when it’s finally delivered in analog? I imagine that the boxes will have HDMI output in the future, so that they can encrypt the data from broadcast all the way to a TV. My only hope is that some Chinese foundary make a well documented HDMI chip or a HDMI to DVI decoder box so I can get my digital TV without encryption, i.e. so that I can actually watch it in digital format.
So it looks as if the media industry, once again, is trying to package up their precious content in formats that are only usable by their allied partners. My problem is that their partners never actually allow me to do anything with the data. For instance, there is no (as far as I’m aware) hard drive recorder that will allow you to record a show and keep it permanently, like you can do with analog and VHS at the moment. So in the future you’ll be allowed to view approved content on an approved vendor device, which sucks if you don’t like any of the approved vendor devices on the market (I wouldn’t try and build my own if I could get one for £500 or so).
Therefore I’ll be sticking with analogue TV untill the market has a better offering or I’m forced to switch in 2011.
Thing is, I’m not looking for all that much. I’m looking for a box that
* plays Digital TV
* plays DVDs
* plays my audio files
* provides a nice calender for the house
* and a TODO list
* and both calender and TODO integrate with my laptop
* and provides VoIP.
I have a box that can do everything except the first point. If I put an analogue decoder card into it I can receive and analgoue TV signal and record it, but I’ll waste power. Think of all the kittens that will kill!
My graphics card (6600GT) has composite and RGB outputs, aparently the three phono plugs for RGB can be used to deliver better quality signals to the TV than you get from standard composite. I was figuring that by either getting a set top Freeview box and capture card which both support RGB I would be able to get a high quality recording of TV programs, then watch them back through the RGB output. It’s not exactly HDTV, but then again I’m quite happy with the quality from the composite cable I have running from the PC to the TV anyway. I’ll be recording programs from the TV straight into MPEG-4 then burning and watching them on my (20 watt peak) DivX DVD player when the computer is off. Should get about 16+ decent quality hours per DVD, and I’ll be able to trim the ends and remove the adverts on my PC before I burn them (if the program is worth watching twice!).
The capture card I’m probably going to buy won’t support RGB capturing (MSI TV @nywhere, costs about £25) so I’ll let you know how it works out for me. The main objective is to capture all my VHS tapes, cos I doubt I’ll be able to replace/repair my VHS players for much long. The card has a wake-to-record feature which I might use for recording things in the middle of the night, although as we know standby is still quite a power drain.
In terms of manufacturer conspiracies, despite the wirings for an RGB scart plug being available on wikipedia, and the three RGB phono sockets I can see as clear as day on my graphics card breakout box, nowhere I’ve looked so far (maplins, froogle, ebuyer) has a simple phono-RGB to scart-RGB adapter for sale…. guess it’s time to get out the soldering iron unless anyone can correct me
Thanks for the info. I’ll be setting up my non-DTV PVR box soon.
Found this thread via a google search for solution of capture to a PCI RGB/scart card………You’ve been no help
in fact you really don’t have a clue! You have even confused component inputs as RGB compliant composite?
They ain’t. A very different criteria…..
Forgive my ignorance, stumbled accross this blog while looking for something DVB-T related. Could you not self install a satellite dish and hook it up to a PCI satellite receiver card? Apologies if this is no use, feel free to ignore at your leisure.
I could, but from what I understand that solution would give me a DVB-S stream but no access to the “freeview” content as much of it is encrypted. I’d still only get BBC 1+2+3+4 and ITV.
technisat skystar 2 pci card 85euro,you get remote,+comp a/v output,connect to 2.4ghtz a/v sender,you`ve sat tv on computor and every tv within 1oo mtrs. rent neigbours a reciever so they can watch your late night broadcasts to recoup outlay
Can’t you hook up a card reader device, CAM, for the extra freeview chanels? You can get the card from anywhere.
Or, maybe way off here, but if there is an RF out/loopback from the sat card, would that be enough to pick up DVB-T?