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I'm told that the HD DVRs that one sees on eBay can do it, if they haven't been disabled by the dish service first. Comment? And, how might one determine that, before purchase?
clark
Follow Ups:
You'll have to wait until August. I understand the Dish TR-50 (?) will have dual tuners and a 250G hard drive and will do it from what I understand.
c
That product is w/o monthly charges and designed for those getting over-the-air signal" the TR-50 takes many of the features found on Dish Networks' excellent satellite DVRs (such as the ViP622 and 722) and brings them to antenna-based TV viewers. "
Maybe there's newer info you have?
Otherwise it looks like just the ticket.
clark
It's fairly clear from what I posted and everything else I've seen that it is a product designed for those who don't want to pay and is meant to basically put a dent in TIVO. I don't record much and decided against it and just bought a Samsung 260 tuner (and for the once every year I might record - 480i into my DVD recorder is fine) to replace my 1st generation Samsung SIR-T150 tuner. He's a You Tube Video explaining its features and also the fact it is for those who don't want to pay for TV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei2wwnKIlQ4
I ask, 'cause I don' watch no low-rez vids no more!
clark
The product should be out in the July/August time frame - so probably 60-90 days. I thought about using the 250G hard drive partially as a kind of music server but I have other options in my set-ups and at my guess of $500-600 street price (that's just my guess - no info), I don't have a personal need for it. It should be ideal for those watching over-the-air HD and who record broadcasts a lot. I'm not much of a TV watcher.
xx
Hi there
One solution for recording OTA HDTV is to use an ATSC tuner with a PC. (Recording digital cable is a bit more problematic, especially HD cableTV.) The ATSC tuners are available as internal PCI or PCI-e cards, as USB dongles and as an Ethernet device; costs vary from $30 (on sale or after-rebate) to ~$200. For the rest of the PC hardware, I've gotten $400 systems to record and playback HDTV. Expect to spend more (and have fewer choices) if you want to connect the PC to the display using HDMI; VGA and DVI are the easiest methods. The software costs vary from free to ???, and the OS could be Linux, WinXP or Vista (I'm totally unfamiliar with Mac). Integrating everything together could take a half-day to forever, depending on knowledge, luck, skill, karma, help from friends and forums.
Regarding the disk storage requirement: the 9 gigabytes per hour storage number is related to the total bandwidth available to the broadcaster. There is some software that records this entire transport stream, but then there are also a lot of recording software that demultiplexes the received data streams and only writes to disk the video and audio streams of the specified subchannel. So a recording of tonight's 60-minute episode of "House" used 7.0 gigabytes. That's a big recording (high bit rate), since some other broadcasters such as KABC-DT tend to use lower bit rates; "Lost" is usually just over 5 GB. (Both are broadcast at 720p video resolution, but obviously use different bit rates.)
Regards
z
Hi there
You haven't mentioned a budget or skill level, but some people like this pre-built home-theater PC:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010DSDXM
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=972427
Regards
x
Hi there
The AVS discussion is mostly on the combo Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive that this PC has. The people who frequent the HTPC forums tend to favor the "latest and greatest". If you mention HDTV, the majority will start discussing digital cable and tend to ignore OTA. The fact that this PC has an NTSC/ATSC tuner is irrelevant to most of the posters.
For a lower price, HP does have models without the hi-def optical drive. The components you do want are Vista Media Center, the ATSC tuner and the nVidia 8500 video card.
Regards
x
Clark,
The Tivo boxes do it. I use DirecTv and their HD DVRs which also captures the OTA HD. I don't know of a way to archive to HD. The digital HD VCRs were an option. I'm not sure what is still available.
Recordable blue-ray has the potential depending upon the copy protection
restrictions.
It's doable, but complex, and it can be expensive. It's called
MythTV. You need to comfortable with Linux, you need to know how to
select hardware too.
Here's the skinny:
The bitstream comes in over the air at 22 Mbits/sec. So, to record
this, it has to go to hard disk and it stores out at 2.75 MB/second, or,
9.9 GB/hour. One hour of recorded data exceed the capacity of a burnable
DVD! This makes it difficult to record an hour long program to DVD, so,
if you're going to record OTA, you'll need a disk storage facility 500GB+
to retain a archive of recorded programming - more if you want a historical archive... You can downconvert the OTA bitstream and lose resolution to make it more recordable to DVD, but the computational complexity of the downconversion can take hours on high powered CPUs.
High throughput CPUs dissipate alot of heat and use alot of electrical poweer. So, now you're talking a dedicated PC with a dual or quad core CPU, external eSATA disk array etc. If you dont need to downconvert
resolution, you can use a lower powered CPU and a big disk array.
I used Mythbuntu to do this (www.mythbuntu.org). You'll need to buy
an HDTV tuner card. I recommend highly the Silicon Dust Dual Tuner ($170), or the Pinnacle PCI HDTV tuner. If you do the Silicon Dust, use a
DEDICATED 100Mbps ethernet network for the video stream. You can
use a cheaper motherboard (An AMD Sempron 3000+ is fine). Plan on Firewire 800 or eSATA as your storage bus because you WILL be stacking up hard drives to expand storage often. Last but not least, you'll be spending at least $80 on a video board that has MPEG2/MPEG4 hardware assisted decode.
I couldnt imagine the cost of a turnkey consumer product to solve this problem... Even with MythTV and Linux, its $500 in computer parts to get a solution built!
As far as MythTV, I use it to record OTA HDTV. I work nutso hours, so when I am home, I am able to watch my favorite OTA shows in Hi Def on my own time!
-- Jim
As I'm sure you know, people are downconverting HD to x264 and putting them in mkv containers. Typically, I see DVD-5 size, about 4.5 Gbytes, holding either 1 hour or 2 hours of originally HD material. Have you compared quality of these down conversions to the original pictures?
Hi there
Rather than "downconverting", converting OTA HDTV files in MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC is "transcoding". Downconverting implies somekind of reduction, presumably in spatial resolution. Transcoding implies no change in resolution, but converting from one codec to another (presumably with better compression but similar PQ).
Regards
Thanks for your answer. I am new to all this, having just gotten my first HD screen, a computer monitor. I have downloaded a couple of these x267 transcodes, one of which is amazing, the other which has some noticeable artifacts. I guess my question still applies. When these are turned into smaller files, has anyone compared to the original to see what might be lost?
Hi there
You have a good question, but I have not done any transcoding to H.264/AVC. One issue is that the PQ of TV shows varies and overall is not all that great. I've downconverted a few episodes of "Lost" and "House" to DVD resolution, and then upconverted for playback on a 720p CRT projector. The difference in PQ is not obvious to me. Some of the travel and nature shows on PBS have great PQ. If only the commercial broadcast networks matched that picture quality!
When transcoding, the digital artifacts will accummulate. And because these are lossy compression schemes, information is lost with each encoding. The concept of "perfect digital copying" does not apply here. Hope somebody can give you an answer.
Regards
But thanks for the clarity on "transcoding".
BTW I have an 8' screen and a JVC D-ILA, with which many (too many?) details can be seen.
clark
s
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