[vlc] Re: HDTV Card Question

[Jerry Scharf]

--On 10/23/2003 04:11:04 PM -0400 Brian Abney wrote:

> Can someone recommend a good HDTV card that also supports NTSC and PAL?
> But most importantly, it needs to work with VLC.
>
> Thank You,
> Brian


I don't think the card can tune PAL, but there is a pci card for US 
DTV/HDTV that works well with linux, www.pchdtv.com. I have one of their 
cards, and it has a simple program that receives the terrestrial hdtv/dtv 
and sends the TS out on stdout. It's not integrated, but I've used it with 
VLC for viewing and streaming it and works. The card also receives NTSC, 
but I haven't played with that to see what the card does exactly. You would 
need to do the analog to mpeg conversion in software on this card, unlike 
the cards like the Huappauge. I was concerned about the quality of the 
drivers, so I went with the simpler card that did everything I needed with 
a solid linux driver.

The MPEG transport stream is the same, but the decoding of the antenna 
input to get the TS out is different for US and European terrestrial 
broadcast. US cable encoding is different again, as is satellite broadcast. 
Also be aware that US and "the rest of the world" also don't agree on the 
sound stream encoding as part of the TS. Doing the transcoding on this 
turns out to be annoying hard.

I don't know of any chips that decode all the flavors of HDTV, let alone 
what they do for all the NTSC, PAL and SECAM variants. Until the chips do 
it, it is unlikely that there will be any boards that do it.

The only other possibility I know of is the GNU software decoder, but that 
can't do full speed decoding of HD speed signals. I'm not sure where they 
are going with trying to remove the problem, but last time I looked they 
didn't have anything on how to attack that or how to do the mpeg TS 
creation for analog streams in real time.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose 
from.

hoe this helps and good luck,
jerry


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