Linux drivers for HDTV tuner cards

[Matt Porter]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 11:30:01PM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 12:12:49PM -0800, Christopher Bardin wrote:
> > > Seems to me that the output to the computer from any
> > > TV tuner card, whether NTSC or HDTV, has to be
> > > digital.  To the computer the main difference between
> > > the two would be data rate and formatting.
> > 
> > Erm, and the register set of the ATSC/decoder chip that
> > is completely different from the BTxxx parts on older
> > Hauppage, STB, ATI, etc etc etc cards.
> 
> Note, this drastically depends on what your "ATSC Card" is doing.  If it
> is just a VSB demodulator that outputs an MPEG transport stream, then
> that is all you have.  If it has an MPEG decoder, then it could be
> roughly the same as your NTSC cards (just sending the video data into
> the video card memory).  I would imagine that most of the NTSC cards
> turn the video into ITU-656, and may require the CPU to put that into
> video data.  Atleast the cheaper ones probably do that.

The TL880 chip on all of the consumer priced cards referred to has an
MPEG decoder onboard and so is doing roughly what the BTxxx cards have
done (as you first suggest).

> > > Just out of curiosity, how big a chunk will a two-hour
> > > HDTV program take out of a hard drive?
> > 
> > 8.7GB/hour of 1080i ATSC broadcast.
> 
> That's not a complete answer, basically it depends on the encoding.  The

<snip good stuff>

Just to be clear, I was specifically referring to what some Windoze
drivers accomplish with the TL880 silicon...only because he was
calling out a bunch of TL880-based cards. :)

Thanks,
-- 
Matt Porter
porter@cox.net
This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.