[linux-dvb] ATSC?

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

I live in the US, where ATSC seems to be more common than DVB.  As far as I
can see (and I am very new to this stuff), the most significant
technological difference between the two technologies is that they are
incompatible.  The adoption of ATSC in North America seems to be a curse,
because those of us who live here will not be able to take advantage of the
DVB hardware which seems to be widely available in Europe.

Anyway, since it seems that on the inside, ATSC (like DVB) encapsulates
MPEG-2, it seems like should be possible to make use of the nice software
which has been written for use with DVB hardware.  Is this true?

If so, does anyone have any experience (of any kind) with ATSC hardware for
the PC?  I went looking for an interface card, and found this:

http://www.computermodules.com/oem/atscmasterfd.shtml

It claims to be full duplex, able to input and output ATSC signals at the
same time.  It doesn't seem to have any MPEG-II encoding/decoding ability,
so that would have to be done in software, I guess.

Most interestingly, though, they claim to have an "open source" Linux
driver!  There is no direct link, but I searched and found it here:

http://www.linsys.ca/resources/ATSC%20Linux.htm

The driver seems to be for Linux 2.2, licensed under the GPL, and dated Jan
11 2001.  It includes a handful of userspace examples that show how the
driver can be accessed.

It doesn't seem to support any kind of demultiplexing / "tuner" facility,
though.  I don't entirely understand how this works yet, but DVB cards seem
to be able to to demux a particular stream based on a frequency parameter,
and I see no such functionality with the above card.

I also found this card, though:

http://www.awaremag.com/hardware/accessdtv/accessdtv_1.html
http://www.accessdtv.com/

which seems to be more of an equivalent to the DVB interface cards that I
have seen.  It has an integrated ATSC tuner (and also handles NTSC), the
chips seem to be made by Philips.  Only Windows software, though.

This looks like it may be the same chipset sold as a different product:

http://www.videon-central.com/products/product_detail.phtml?product_id=23

I am currently stuck with this awful set-top box:

http://gicout50.gic.gi.com/databases/gi/productc.nsf/487d09d64349e557852565db006d892d/f2fc5fd5cda96f2185256a3b005d9a5a?OpenDocument

Which I would like to bypass entirely, due to its unusably slow user
interface for the program guide, and lack of features for timer recording.

Questions:

1. Is this just a fantasy?  Can I build an ATSC video appliance using Linux
and commodity hardware today?  How much software will I have to write?  Is
anyone else working on this?

2. Is it possible to provide a unified API for ATSC and DVB, or are they too
different?

-- 
 - mdz


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