Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Cheap Hardware For ATSC Reception

[Dave Emery]

On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 04:49:43PM +0000, Daniel Schmelzer wrote:
> Hi Steve--
> 
> Fair question, since the WinTV-D is a fine board.  In fact, I have a WinTV-D 
> and am encouraging good open driver support for it (always looking for 
> volunteers--email, if interested).
> 
> But I omitted it from the list, since getting the raw stream from the board 
> is a complicated business--Hauppauge implemented their demuxer in an FPGA 
> that, by its nature, is closed and has no documentation.  This is a shame, 
> since the decoder/bridge that Hauppauge used, the Conexant Fusion 878A, is 
> one of the chipsets best supported by the open development community.
> 
> Hauppauge has a Windows datacasting application that captures a stream, but 
> it is nearly featureless and buggy (useless for most applications).  
> Hauppauge stopped development on the board and data capture app about a year 
> and a half ago, and I guess that they haven't printed more of these boards 
> for several years.
> 
> Regards--
> 
> Dan

        There is a later board with a HD MPEG-2 chip on it called a
Win-HD that capable of HD to RGB decoding and supposedly ITC HD
transport stream to PCI copy.

        As far as I know this board is still current (at least I was
able to purchase one on the web recently, and several distributors 
offered them a month ago).   What with the copy protection working group
agreements I am not sure how long the board will be available but last I
knew the latest version of the Hauppauge Windoze software could capture
the transport streams unencrypted into files and play back from those
files.  They appear to have implemented a crude DVR for HDTV in fact.

        I haven't had time to look into the chips on the Win-HD, and
would be very interested in whether anybody else has started to figure
out a programmers model for it.  I might be inclined to start playing
with coding a Linux driver if someone could supply any clue as to how to
program the card (eg documentation of the chip APIs).  It does come with
a Windoze application, and given a lot of pain (I hate pain) it might be
possible to reverse engineer the required information (I have done that
kind of thing in a previous life, but I don't exactly relish the
prospect).   And if anyone else is working on a driver, I might be able
to help a bit on that as well...

        The Win-HD retailed via national websites at around $414 or so
last I checked, BTW, so it is a little bit more expensive than the older
board.   But it will do ATSC HDTV to RGB conversion (not sure about
YCrCB) in a variety of formats.

        And I suppose the obvious need not be stated - if one wants ATSC
decoding capability (for LEGAL fair use !!) one had better act now
before the door is forever closed and any device or technique to do so
is regarded as a DMCA circumvention device and criminalized.  It seems
clear that it is unlikely that existing devices will become  illegal -
but future ones are almost certain to...

        
-- 
        Dave Emery N1PRE,  address@hidden  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18