[linux-dvb] Re: ATSC?

["Daniel Schmelzer" <dschmelzer@hotmail.com>]

Hi Matt--

A good place to find information on these cards is AVS Forum 
(www.avsforum.com).  Do a search in the home theater computers section and 
you'll have a couple of days of reading. ;-)  Most of the info is regarding 
Windows.  There is precious little open source code, since the HD decoder 
cards on the market are based on the Teralogic TL880 decoder/bridge, and 
Teralogic has been tight with the info.

If you are interested in doing some hardware coding for these cards, the 
WinTV-D is an excellent and inexpensive choice.  It uses the Fusion 878A PCI 
bridge.  If so, drop me a line, as I have a contact at Hauppauge who would 
help us.

See the below for some chip lists.

http://www.schmelzer.org/dschmelzer/computers.htm

I think that there is some open source demux code for Windows, which might 
be somewhat portable to Linux.

As to your questions:

#1 -- Yes, you can.  But the open source code isn't totally there.

#2 -- Probably not.  The ATSC cards use different PCI bridges (either the 
Teralogic TL880 or the Fusion 878A).  So the project would have to accept 
code for these bridges.

The adoption of ATSC is a boon rather than a curse.  There is plenty of ATSC 
hardware out there.

Good luck.

Regards--

Dan

>From: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
>To: linux-dvb@linuxtv.org
>Subject: [linux-dvb] ATSC?
>Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 23:25:09 -0500
>
>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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